On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 12:58:41PM -0400, Gerard Ceraso wrote:
I have a hard drive that is going bad so I want to copy it from the old hard drive to the new one, same hd and everything. I was wondering which was faster doing dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hda or mounting each partition and and just using cp.
dd copies the entire drive, including all the blank space. cp won't copy the blank bits, so that's faster.
dd also copies things like the filesystem metadata and the partition table. So if you have an 80 GB drive and dd it to 120 GB drive, you would need to utilize some utility to grow or resize your filesystem, or otherwise utilize the leftover free space. Of course, if your destination drive is smaller, that could be a problem.
-Roberto
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