raw disk copying?

[Tom Uban]

After some more searching, it appears that the whole disk
device suffix has changed from 'c' to 'd' and as such if
I use /dev/rwd1d as the destination, it doesn't complain.
I'll know more after it completes in a few hours.

Sorry to bother people with stupid questions...

I'm still curious if Partition Magic and/or Ghost are able
to copy raw disks.

--tnx
--tom

>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.
>
>My first experiment was with linux where I created a PC linux
>boot CD and hooked my two drives up planning to just dd from
>one drive's raw device to the other. To my amazement, I discovered
>that linux does not have a raw disk I/O capability by default.
>I tried using the block devices, but the resulting copy was
>not intact. After doing a bit of searching, I discovered that
>there is some sort of rawio extension which allows a raw device
>to be associated with a block device, but it also said that dd
>would not work with this raw device due to buffer alignment
>issues vs. DMA. Go figure...
>
>My second attempt was with a NetBSD 3.0 install CD, exiting to
>the shell and trying dd from rwd0a to rwd1a. I know that back
>in the dark ages, this was possible, but apparently in these
>modern times things have changed. When I try to do this I receive
>a read only error on the /dev/rwd1a device. When the PC boots,
>the wdX information goes by to quickly to read and the dmesg
>command is not present on the install CD image.
>
>Is what I want to do possible (anymore)? Do I have to resort
>to purchasing Partition Magic or Ghost or something like that?
>Do these programs even work on raw disks which have no file
>system?
>
>--tnx
>--tom