Is dd ok?

[Leon Goldstein]

Klaus-Peter Schrage schrieb auf Englisch:

> 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.).

I would like to clone a drive that has run out of space to a bigger 
one.  Will Klaus-Peter's procedure duplicate the existing partitions' 
original size on the new drive, or will they expand proportionally to 
fill it?

If dd only duplicates the original partition's size, could I partition 
the target drive before running dd?

-- 
Leon A. Goldstein

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