Hello,

I want to clone some Hard drives (20GB) and place them on our new 80GB drives.

We have a server where all the images are placed.

I tried to do a dd if=/dev/hdc of=/bootserver/hdc.img - however that did not work.

I also tried to use Ghost for Linux and put the image on a USB drive - however it did not start transferring.

Any suggestions -

Thanks

Here's a simple how-to for using dd to migrate everything from one hard drive to a bigger one:

http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=149328

Doing "dd if=/dev/hdc of=/bootserver/hdc.img" should have "worked", but of course all it does is create an image file. You'd need to run another dd command to copy from the image file to the new hard drive. (Naturally, you shouldn't have any partitions on hdc mounted when doing any of this.)

Thanks I will take a look at the site -

When I tried the dd command it gave me an input-output error and only did the first 3 gigs of the 20GB HD.

Exact error is:

dd: reading '/dev/hda': Input/Output error

3GB copied -

There is plenty of space where I am copying - happens to any disk I try to clone.

It looks like the drive you are copying from has errors on it. If that is the case I wouldn't want to run off of it or a copy of it until you fix them (asuming they are fixable). Check the filesystem and the surface of the disks for bad blocks. How to do this depends on the filesystem.

Here is an excellent article on using dd: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd

It also talks about recovering media with errors on it. Note that it tells you to use 'conv=noerror' to keep copying even if you encounter errors. I would recommend against trying that until you first try to fix the errors because when dd encounters an error it fills the rest of the block the error was on with zeros. Who knows what kind of damage that could do.

Have you used partimage? You will need the space to place the compressed image before transferring though.