Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 09:21:29 -0800 (PST) From: Ken Bolingbroke <hacker@bolingbroke.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: "'Peter Radcliffe'" <pir@pir.net> Subject: Re: disk cloning (& a bit of picobsd) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003100905030.66391-100000@fremont.bolingbroke.com> In-Reply-To: <20000310115700.C2584@pir.net>
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Redirected from -stable to -questions. On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, 'Peter Radcliffe' wrote: > Disk cloning with dd is evil. Don't Do That. > > My recommendation is to partition the disk as you desire, newfs and mount > the partitions then use > cd /new/partition; dump 0f - /original/partition | restore rf - Is there a particular reason you say dd is evil for disk cloning? I admin a lab full of machines with various OS flavors. The PCs especially serve multiple duty running FreeBSD, Linux, or <shame>NT</shame>. When the machines get trashed, or I have a sudden need for extra machines of a particular configuration, it would be nice to have a easy way to clone the disks and restore things. As it happens, I do have access to a hardware disk cloner, which is way cool. But that means I have to A) maintain a master disk for each configuration, and B) take the drives out of each machine and plug them into the disk cloner. Both of these are somewhat undesirable. So I've been envisioning something where I can maintain compressed master copies of each configuration on a humonguous disk on the lab server, then when I want to restore/change a specific machine, I insert a boot floppy that reads the image off the server and writes it to disk. Bingo, a fresh new machine, ready to use! My initial tests with 'dd if=/dev/rwd1 bs=32k | gzip -9 /bigslice/fbsd.dsk' then a corresponding 'gzcat /bigslice/fbsd.dsk | dd of=/dev/rwd1 bs=32k' look promising. And best of all, it's OS-neutral. I don't have to worry about how to create NT partitions and write to NTFS or any of that crap. Just clone the whole disk and be done with it. So is this bad, evil even? And back to that thing about making a boot floppy...is it just me, or does 3.4-STABLE's source code not build a picobsd 'net' boot floppy? I make the floppy image, write it to floppy, then boot up on it and the boot loader craps out with errors I don't recall at the moment. Repeatedly banging my head on it didn't help a whole lot, altho I noticed that midway through my attempts, CVSup brought in new stuff that changed the whole thing somewhat dramatically. I sorta thought -STABLE would be, well, stable, but doesn't seem to be the case for picobsd... Ken Bolingbroke hacker@bolingbroke.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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