Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 08:11:57 -0600 (CST) From: Conrad Sabatier <cjsabatier@home.com> To: Joseph Gao <Joseph.Gao@btinternet.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Message-ID: <XFMail.010128081157.cjsabatier@home.com> In-Reply-To: <000c01c08915$54869ac0$5dff7ad5@tinypc>
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On 28-Jan-01 Joseph Gao wrote: > > On 27-Jan-01 Joseph Gao wrote: >> Dear Sir/Madame: >> I am in London and am in desperate need for help. I need to be able to copy >> the entire contents of an older hard disk onto a newer one (including >> non-window operating system). I would be deeply indebted if you could >> enlighten me on how to do this, as soon as possible. If it is out of your >> capacity, I'm sorry for troubling you and would like to thank you for taking >> time to read this. > > man dd I know, the man page can be rather overwhelming. :-) dd is a very low-level copy program. I think the name stands for "disc duplicator" or "data duplicator" or something like that. dd will copy *everything* from the input device to the output device, at the byte/sector level. The basic syntax is very simple: dd if=device of=device Where "if" is the input and "of" is the output. Data is copied in 512-byte blocks by default, which is perfect for FreeBSD, since this is how data is stored at the lowest level. Also, by default, the copying begins with sector zero and ends with the last sector on the input device. A complete copy, in other words. Let's say you want to copy your first master disc to your first slave disc (ad0 to ad1): dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad1 You should probably format the output device first, if it hasn't been already. Of course, you'll want to be root to do all of this. I'm *assuming* you're trying to do this under FreeBSD (since you did post this question in a FreeBSD mailing list). :-) Well, this is how we do it. :-) Good luck. Let us know how it goes. Conrad -- Conrad Sabatier cjsabatier@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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