Shawn Fertch wrote: > Seems fairly straightforward. However, the questions I have are: > > -Will dd copy over the partition information as well, or should I > create the partions by hand and then use dd on each partition such as: > dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 Yes, dd is a just a raw image copy of the drive. It will copy the boot sector, partition table, and all data just as it exists on the current drive. You should dd to the same sized disk, preferrably one with matching geometry (cylinder, heads, sectors/track) values. You can dd a smaller drive to a larger one but that will make the larger drive effectively be the size of the smaller one. Waste of space. > -Do I need to specify any block sizes or error correcting? I never have when I've copied drives and they have always worked just fine. I've always dd'd to similar sized drives with matching geometry though. > The cause for replacing the drive is that the root ( / ) partition has > marked itself as read-only. Doing fsck's and rebooting is no longer > correcting the issue. In doing a dd from one drive to the other, is > there a chance that whatever is marking the partition read-only will > be brought over as well? Since dd is just a raw image copy, when you dd to the new drive, your root partition will still be marked read-only. I haven't run across a root partition marking itself read-only before. I have to believe this can be corrected with enough googling. I have to throw this out there: you do have backups you can restore from, right? :P -- scot _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list