Grant <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thank you, I've booted to a LiveCD I'm in the middle of copying > everything from the old drive to the new drive with: > > cp -ax /olddrive/* /newdrive/
"cp" neither has a "-a" nor a "-x" option. Are you talking abut "gcp"? > but it's taking hours. Both drives are SATAII and there is about > 250GB of data to transfer. The CD spins periodically, the hard disk > activity light stays lit, and I can hear the old drive working > periodically, but I'm thinking this is too long. The fastest and most correct way to copy directory trees is to use star because star forks into two processes and decouples the read process from the write process. star -copy -p -acl -sparse -xdot -time -C /olddrive . /newdrive If you have plenty of RAM, give star half of the RAM as FIFO using the fs= option (e.g. fs=256M). If your new filesystem is not optimized for write speed, you may like to add the -no-fsync option but then star cannot tell you whether the copy was successful (BTW: GNU tar never calls fsync(2) and thus never may grant a successful copy). ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/ Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
