Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Cary, NC, USA
Posts: 89

Copying harddrive - dd parms?

The 80GB drive I've been using in my TiVo is going bad - I got an RMA replacement from Maxtor and I plan to hook both drives to a PC and use Dylan's disk to dd the entire contents of the old drive to the new one. Does anyone have advice on the blocksize to use for fastest copying? I think I used ibs=1024 obs=1024 when I first copied my original 30GB drive and it took at least 3+ hours (that's when I went to bed). Obviously 80G will take much longer, so will a dd blocksize of, say, 32768 be appreciably faster? I intend to put each drive on its own IDE controller if that's relevant. Don't think I can handle 12 or so hours with the TiVo out of action!

Thanks for any help.

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BluesFools

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Milpitas, CA
Posts: 1

If your blocksize is 1, set your count to close to the size of your RAM. That way you can have one big read going from the IDE drive to RAM, and when it gets almost full, then one big read back out to the target drive. That's as fast as it gets. Sorry, IDE is slow.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 67

The blocksize won't matter much. What you really need to do is NOT use the boot disk. It byteswaps the disk I/O and really slows down the copy. Just boot up your regular Linux partition.

If you are one of those unfortunates that does not run Linux, the easiest thing to do (if you have a cdr drive) is to burn a copy of kazymyr's boot CDROM. It has a menu that allows you to boot without byteswapping. Should be done in 1-2 hrs.

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Hinsdale, IL, US
Posts: 75

The fastest block size will be in relation to memory, processing power. More significant reduction in speed would be doing it with the noswap boot option on Kazymyrs Boot Cd.
A 30gb drive is often done in less than 40 minutes without byteswapping.

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Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Charlotte
Posts: 949

Ack, I'm about to do this also.... But unfortunetly I dont have Linux and my CD-Rom is not bootable (SCSI). Is there any Dos/Win program that can copy the image successfuly?
Maybe the latest edition of Norton Ghost? I know the older version does not work, but read something about the newest one might?



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- Jones
Running v2.0.1 on 30hr Philips... Upgraded to 128 hours with 80Gig Maxtor.

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Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Valencia, Ca
Posts: 221

If I were you I'd find an el-cheapo IDE CD-ROM to boot off of. It's worth it.

-- Rob

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Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Charlotte
Posts: 949

I'm waiting until I have enough money to replace my CD-R. Still have uneasy feelings about replacing a SCSI CD-R with an IDE one though....



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- Jones
Running v2.0.1 on 30hr Philips... Upgraded to 128 hours with 80Gig Maxtor.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 67

quote:

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Originally posted by vertigo235:
Ack, I'm about to do this also.... But unfortunetly I dont have Linux and my CD-Rom is not bootable (SCSI). Is there any Dos/Win program that can copy the image successfuly?
Maybe the latest edition of Norton Ghost? I know the older version does not work, but read something about the newest one might?

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location:
Posts: 422

quote:

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Originally posted by vertigo235:
I'm waiting until I have enough money to replace my CD-R. Still have uneasy feelings about replacing a SCSI CD-R with an IDE one though....

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