[Techtalk] dd copy of 75 GB disk to 80 GB disk

[Akkana]

Helen Katz writes:
> We have a bad IBM 75 Gb disk , which , at last,
> IBM is willing to replace it with a new type of 80 GB.
> Can I do :
>  dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=noerror,sync
> and keep all my info. intact ?
> Or is a problem with the different size ?

I tried that fairly recently -- I'd installed Mandrake on one disk
but wanted it on a new disk without going through the install again,
so I dd'ed.  The two partitions were of similar, but not identical,
size.  At first, it appeared to work ... but the installation on the
new disk was always flaky, things that I thought should have worked
didn't ...  I'm not very familiar with Mandrake so for a while I thought
maybe Mandrake was just like that, but eventually I came to suspect that
something had gone wrong in the dd, maybe due to the different sizes.
I gave up on making that installation work.

I decided that a better way, which I'll do next time, would have
been to do a mkfs on the new partition, mount them both, then
cp -a /oldpartition /newpartition.

	...Akkana