Re: [SLUG] Duplicating a HDD

[davidf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Fitch)]

Doug Stalker <dougs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Scenario:  I have two HDDs that are identical (same brand, model, size,
> etc) and I want to make one a copy of the other.  At the moment I'm just
> plaicng them both into a system, booting up from a disk with TOMSRTBT on
> it, and running dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda.  This works, but takes a
> long time - it has to copy all the blank space on the HDD as well, and
> the particular systems I'm using for this are *very* slow with HDD
> access.
> 
> How could I do this quicker?

sorry for the delayed response, but a small possibly useful
point: try "dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda bs=10240k".

Under solaris the default block size is 512 bytes so dd'ing
anything large takes ages.  My suggestion above is 10Mb
block size, see if it makes a difference (i've no idea if linux
does this similarly to solaris but don't see why not).

Dave.