Physical Duplication of Hard Drives

[Barry OGrady]

I agree, oops, I mean, see V

A pox on you top posters who can't be bothered to trim their posts.

I agree.


-Barry
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[David A.Lethe]

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesnt. Basically that approach risks
a mismatch between the short and long file names and that can bite.

Makes a lot more sense to use something
like xxcopy instead, it fixes that problem.

Dedicate a LINUX PC for this, and purchase external enclosures and
additional disk controller cards as necessary. YOu can then make
numerous copies simultaneously. Furthermore, as long as the boot
disk is on it's own controller, then you can scan for new disks w/o
doing a reboot, so you never have to take the machine down when you
add new disks. It doesn't; matter if you have IDE, SCSI or even fibre
channel disks, or all of them. Just build the PC such that the O/S is
on it's own controller, so you can have it discover new disks w/o
forcing a reboot.

you can just use the standard LINUX utilities to clone disks and
manipulate partition tables. The O/S doesn't care what operating
system(s) the disks have on them any more than a disk duplicator does.

(Warning, make sure you get the type of hot-swap components that can
handle a high number of inserts ... just don't pick something up at a
local computer store for the lowest price w/o consulting the
manufacturer.

 

[Eric Gisin]

| >
| >Makes a lot more sense to use something
| >like xxcopy instead, it fixes that problem.
| >
| Dedicate a LINUX PC for this, and purchase external enclosures and
| additional disk controller cards as necessary. YOu can then make
| numerous copies simultaneously. Furthermore, as long as the boot
| disk is on it's own controller, then you can scan for new disks w/o
| doing a reboot, so you never have to take the machine down when you
| add new disks. It doesn't; matter if you have IDE, SCSI or even fibre
| channel disks, or all of them. Just build the PC such that the O/S is
| on it's own controller, so you can have it discover new disks w/o
| forcing a reboot.
|
| you can just use the standard LINUX utilities to clone disks and
| manipulate partition tables. The O/S doesn't care what operating
| system(s) the disks have on them any more than a disk duplicator does.
|
This (I take it you mean dd) does not work in general on older machines. It
only works if the disk's H/S geometries are the same, and they are not for
drives under 4GB. Or is there proper FAT cloning for Linux?

Can fdisk write standard MBR boot code with Int13 extensions?

| (Warning, make sure you get the type of hot-swap components that can
| handle a high number of inserts ... just don't pick something up at a
| local computer store for the lowest price w/o consulting the
| manufacturer.
|
|

 

[Rod Speed]

Dedicate a LINUX PC for this, and purchase external
enclosures and additional disk controller cards as necessary.

Thats not going to work for the original poster, particularly
wont be able to automatically resize the source partition to
suit the destination drive which will vary in size quite a bit
because they are the available used hard drives.

YOu can then make numerous copies simultaneously. Furthermore,
as long as the boot disk is on it's own controller, then you can scan
for new disks w/o doing a reboot, so you never have to take the
machine down when you add new disks. It doesn't; matter if you
have IDE, SCSI or even fibre channel disks, or all of them. Just
build the PC such that the O/S is on it's own controller, so
you can have it discover new disks w/o forcing a reboot.

Sure, but there's a problem with resizing the partition to suit the output drive.

you can just use the standard LINUX utilities to clone disks and
manipulate partition tables. The O/S doesn't care what operating
system(s) the disks have on them any more than a disk duplicator does.

Yes, but both will have a problem with the wide variety
of drives that need to be cloned to, on size alone, and
also the other problem with extended LBA support etc.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense to use something like Drive
Image which doesnt have the stupid 'license' conditions that
Ghost has, or use an older version of Ghost which doesnt either.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I have a 6x86 computer that had a 405 mb hard drive. I wanted to substitute a
10 gig without reinstalling, so I used windows explorer to copy all the files, put
the 10 gig as primary master, and it booted normally.

But that is a slow process which OP wants to avoid.