raw disk copying?

[Tom Uban]

Thanks for the info Bruce, I will certainly check out those various
options for the next time I need to do this. Fortunately my last
attempt using 'dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=/dev/rwd1d bs=64k' with a 3.0
NetBSD install IOS image CD worked well.

--tom

At 04:26 AM 4/25/2006 -0700, Bruce Lane wrote:

>Hi, Tom,
>
>*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>
>On 24-Apr-06 at 22:29 Tom Uban wrote:
>
> >I have a pair of IDE hard drives and I want to do a raw copy
> >from one to the other. I've tried a couple of different approaches
> >so far without much luck.
>
>         <snippety>
>
>         There exists dedicated software that is designed to do a 
> bit-for-bit copy under such conditions. One of my favorites, mainly 
> because it'll do a lot more than just copy, is SCSI Mechanic (yes, it'll 
> work on IDE drives as well). Details on such may be found here: 
> http://www.scsimechanic.com/
>
>         I've run it under Windows 2000 without any problems. If the OS 
> can see the drives, SM should be able to work with them. File system and 
> format are utterly irrelevant if you don't need to actually access the 
> disks through Windows.
>
>         Just as a recent example, I've used SM to make image file copies 
> of the hard drives from several Telenex serial data analyzers, built in 
> the mid-90's. They use a highly-customized Unix variant for their 
> operating system. SM under W2K had no trouble at all creating bit-for-bit 
> image files, or backup copies to another drive.
>
>         There are other ways besides SM. I also own a dedicated 
> hardware-level drive duplicator, and there are other software packages as 
> well. Some examples are:
>
>         http://www.drive-image.com/
>
>         http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ (though 
> I will freely admit I'm not a big fan of Acronis products).
>
>         There is a big list of free utilities at this link:
>
>         http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml
>
>         Happy hunting.
>
>
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
>Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com
>kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
>"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with 
>surreal ports?"