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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
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Subject: Re: disk-to-disk copy
To: rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com (Rodney W. Grimes)
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 16:08:13 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Questions)
In-Reply-To: <199609280752.AAA14955@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> from "Rodney W. Grimes" at Sep 28, 96 00:51:55 am
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Rodney W. Grimes writes:
>
>> I have 2 SCSI disks which are going bad, and I've already
>> gotten (identical) replacement drives. I'd like to copy
>> everything (data, partition tables, etc) from the old drives
>> to the new ones. Is there an easy way to do this?
>>
>> Nothing jumped out at me from the man pages. I'd rather
>> not have to go through disklabel, dump, restore, etc.
>
> If they are truely identical in block count this will do it:
> dd if=/dev/rsdX of=/dev/rsdY bs=8192
>
> Note that hard errors are going to cause this to abort, so turn
> on ARRE to try and minimize them with:
> scsi -f /dev/rsdX -m 1 -P3 -e

I've been waiting to see if anybody said aye or nay about this one.
Last time I tried it, about a year ago both on 2.1-prerelease and
2.2-current, it didn't work: there are various interlocks which
prevent you from overwriting volume labels.  I don't have the time to
check if it's still the case, but I'd be very interested in feedback.

Greg