Is dd ok?

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:
> My wife's got an old IBM 350 MHz PII machine with a 6 G IDE harddisk. It
> is partinioned for dual booting with Grub to Win98 SE and RH 9 (which,
> alas, she uses very rarely - she's quite content with the few apps she
> uses in Win98: Winword, Excel, Mozilla mail and browser).
>
> As you might imagine, diskspace is running short sooner or later with
> such a setup on 6 G, so we bought a new 40 G harddisk which I plugged in
> as secondary master in order to copy over the entire stuff. As the disk
> was rather cheap and I was rather daring, I booted my knoppix cd,
> checked if /dev/hdc was recognized and gave:
> 	dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc.
> dd buzzed for about one and a half hour, and after it had finished I was
> rather surprised to have all the partitions copied from hda to hdc, no
> error messages, and all fscks were ok.
>
> After I had removed the old disk and put the new one in place, there was
> Grub, I could boot into either OS without any difference (only quite a
> lot faster due to the new disk).
>
> Now, has this been TOO easy? I found nothing on the net about doing such
> a foolish thing or any caveats (differing geometries etc.).

Nope, its _that_ easy.  Ain't Linux grand?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman				netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo		     http://netllama.ipfox.com