Hello everybody, i need your help to make an axact copy of a primary master hard disk to a secondary master hard disk in fedora?, this is what i've tryed to do:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd

but when i hit enter, it stays there for a long time with the cursor blinking and don't see any activity, but when i cancel using ctrl+c, it shows the following for example:

51010018+0 read
51010015+0 written

can you please help me?

thank you

It depend upon size of HD, so it will take some time to write it back.

the size of hda=40gb and hdd=40gb, i know that a command to check how the copy of the disk is going exists, but i don't now which is the command , by any chance do you know which is it?

After a certain time , it tells me that dd: writing /dev/hdd : no space available
and like i said both Hard Disc's are 40Gb.
can some one please help to make an exact copy of my hard disk?

Thanks once again!!!

great!!!! i've got the copy of my hard disc, but i don't know why i had to use a hard disc (targe) of more capacity than the original (source) drive..

any way , it worked!!!

thanks

did you have any WIn XP FAT32 / NTFS partitons on your hard disc??
I want to make an exact duplicate but with the FAT32 and NTFS as well as the Linux partitions.
Anyone done this?

Help would be much appreciated.

I doubt the command "dd" cares whether the partition is ext2, ext3, ntfs, vfat or whatever. It simply reads the disk directly and writes to another partition or to a file.

I have not used "dd" much for backup purposes, but I would make a large partition for the backup drive so that all other partitions can fit onto it. Then I'd instruct "dd" to write the other partitions to files on the large backup partition. This way you'd end up with neat files residing on the backup partition.

Otherwise you'd have to create lots of unneeded partitions.

Btw. "dd" copies the data, not the master boot record. You'll have to recreate it in case of a system failure.