> Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 15:11:55 -0800 > From: a monkey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Now, dd is supposed to be able to transfer my linux partitions and their > contents over to another drive, correct? I just bought a brand new eMac > G4, and would like not to have to reinstall Linux on it. I want to just > transfer all of my linux partitions and there contents over to my new > eMac, in a snap. Does anybody know how I would do this? Any help > appreciated.
The problem with dd is that it works at a lower level than the filesystem, so all the filesystem information (superblocks, filesystem size, blocksize, bytes/inode ratio, etc.) gets transferred verbatim. That's perfect if the two partitions are the same size, but if you transfer into a larger partition then you'll end up with a smaller filesystem within a larger partition. It will work fine, but you won't be able to access the extra space. (At least this used to be true of old Unix filesystems, I haven't dug into these details for a long time so I'm not sure about Linux ext filesystems.) What I usually do instead is something like: cd from; tar cf - . | (cd to; tar xfBp -) & where "from" and "to" are the mount points of the respective source and destination partitions. (If you have sufficient RAM you can speed up the transfer by specifying a larger block size to tar.) This can also be piped over a network if the disks are on different machines. In my experience this usually works better in the other direction, e.g. (on the destination machine): cd to; ssh -n [EMAIL PROTECTED] "cd from; tar cf - ." | tar xfBp - & where "host" is the name of the source machine and "user" is your login there. A bonus of using tar is that the resulting filesystem will be defragmented, whereas dd will transfer the holes along with the data. I'm perhaps overly cautious, but I always do a diff -r after the transfer before wiping the source. Ray _______________________________________________ yellowdog-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'
