# Exact duplication of drive



## murias (Jan 30, 2009)

I have an install and post install that I am quite pleased with.

Want I am wanting to do with this now it to duplicate the entire drive; partitions slices and the filesystems to other drives, which are the same hard drives.  So I may place these drives into other machines, which are the exact same machines.  I am thinking that this should be rather straight forward but not finding too much.  

I do have the capability to use another machine to assist in this process, or I have several IDE busses on the first machine to do this also.

Is there an easy way of doing this?  Or what is the simplest way of doing this.

TIA
Murias


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## ale (Jan 30, 2009)

I think that `# dd if=/dev/ad[i]x[/i] of=/dev/ad[i]y[/i]` should work.
Pay attention at typing the correct input and output devices!!


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## graudeejs (Jan 30, 2009)

dd if=/dev/ad.... of=/dev/ad.... bs=8m

without bs it'll be *very slow*
you may want to increase bs

read man dd for more info


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## Carpetsmoker (Jan 31, 2009)

You can use iostat(8) to measure disk transfer speeds, depending on the disks you will get the best speed with a blocksize of 8 to 32MB.


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## Djn (Jan 31, 2009)

Or gstat - or just press Ctrl+T while dd is running.


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## murias (Jan 31, 2009)

This all worked like a charm.  Much thanx to all of you for your inputs.  It was great to see people add to the information as it went along.  really pleased about the Ctrl+t tip.  saved me from wondering what was really happening, which is sometimes teh benefit to having a gui.

cheers


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