Re: Cloning a disk using dd


Using Linux tools as a backup method warrants further investigation, if
the external 'one-touch' drives are too expensive- and if you cand do it
consistently, repeatably, and reliably, you have found yourself a
business opportunity (details left as an exercise for reader).

HTH and TTFN,
Tarkin

Here is a little more information. Windows always finds a way to surprise
me, just when I think I know how bad it is it comes up with a new way to
misbehave. As I said earlier the cloning worked. However there is a big
caveat, DO NOT PUT THE CLONED DISK AND THE ORIGINAL DISK IN SAME
SYSTEM!!!!!. Windows found a way to break both copies. When I ran the
cloned version by itself everything was fine. Then I reconnected the
original disk and things looked OK for a while, the original disk showed
up as a drive on the new system and everything seemed to working. After a
reboot things started to go wrong, the new system started getting some
Windows internal errors. I then disconnected the old drive and rebooted,
the new version just hung. I then tried to boot the old drive by itself,
it was missing some critical files and wouldn't boot either. I'm going to
restore the old drive, reclone it and then make sure the clone stays
stable before I try this on a non-sandbox system. I'm guessing that XP
somehow treated the two file systems as one and managed to corrupt both.
I doubt that this was deliberately malicious behavior, I suspect it's due
to incompetence.

It's clear that this isn't a great backup strategy. It's fine as a disk
upgrade technique as long as you plan to remove the old drive, but it
won't work for backup.
.

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