TiVo Community Forums Archives - 100gb to 100gb direct Hard Drive Copy...

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100gb to 100gb direct Hard Drive Copy...
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Posted by: Mavromatis

Hi there... I have a 100gb Maxtor that sounds like it's on its last leg... I would like to make an exact copy (with video) to the new exact drive. How do I do that without having to backup? I want to do a bit-for-bit copy.

I am using XP... but would like to do it in Linux because it can detect the 100gb drives... my bios can't...

Thanks,
Danny

Posted by: jdm5

Check out the Hinsdale how to for the instructions on using the Linux dd copy.

Posted by: Mavromatis

ahhh... yes... I had the old version (9-1-01)... the new one has the way to do it... Thanks.

Posted by: Otto

Put the drives in, make sure bswap is turned off for both of them, then simply do a:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

Change hda and hdb to whatever drives you've put them in as. Don't bother with the bs parameter, it doesn't really help to set this manually. Or use bs=1024k if you want to set it anyway (some people do, don't ask me why).

Posted by: Mavromatis

Is it suppose to take over 12 hours to copy a 100gig drive using DD? I started last night and it is still going?? The drive was pretty full....

Posted by: HTH

quote:
Originally posted by Mavromatis
Is it suppose to take over 12 hours to copy a 100gig drive using DD? I started last night and it is still going?? The drive was pretty full....

How full the original was is immaterial. It's copying every byte in 512 byte blocks (if bs parameter omitted), including bytes in free space. This will take a long time. Some speed improvement could have been achieved by having one on the primary bus and the other on the secondary, or if the destination drive was known to be zeroed you could have told it not to copy zeroed blocks, but it isn't worth it to start over now.

I trust you're certain that the new drive's capacity is either exactly the same or slightly greater than the original. There is some variation drive to drive from the same manufacturer.

Posted by: Mavromatis

I used: dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=32k, which was stated in the how-to... yes they are exact drives...

I bet it is done now... I am at work so I can't check... I'll let you know tonight... I hope... that would be like 24hrs... Danny

Posted by: Olly

I did a similar operation to copy the original 40GB drive to a 120GB one before expanding it and it took just over an hour. I used the same command line as you.

Posted by: kazymyr

make sure you didn't forget the "k" at the end of "bs=32k", as I've seen someone else do recently. :) That would explain 24h+.

Posted by: Mavromatis

I think I did that... just 32... no 32k... how long to you expect that to run for...??

Posted by: kazymyr

Few days maybe. :D If it's not finished when you get home, just stop it and restart... leave the "bs=..." out altogether if you're using the CD, the default block size is 1 meg. That's big enough for a fast copy (1-2h).

Posted by: HTH

quote:
Originally posted by kazymyr
the default block size is 1 meg.

Must be a special build of dd on the CD then. Every man page I read on dd says the default block size is 512 bytes, not 1,048,576 bytes.

Posted by: Mavromatis

yea!!! I love TiVo!! It copied... Thanks guys.