AW writes:
> 1. As far as I know, it's not possible to simply copy a working /dev tree.
> These are special files which are generated with the mknod utility.
>
> 2. Booting a computer is fairly complex. Everything needs to be at a
> specific
> location on the drive, needs to occupy the appropriate sectors - which
> vary in
> precise size depending on the drive geometry as well as the partitioning.
> And
> everything needs to appropriately connected together.
>
> 3. dd copies at the bit level. It's a low level utility. And that's why
> it
> works, while the high level rsync or cp utility will not.
This certainly makes sense to me but it has some rather
interesting disaster recovery implications. In this case, I am
just going to a newer and slightly larger boot drive and I am
lucky to have both the actual hard drive and a thumb drive copy
of that drive to experiment with. The thumb drive copy is also a
dd clone of the original hard drive and is obviously good
because it was what I used to make the new boot drive. If one
was having a bad day and their boot drive made a horrible noise
and blew out a cloud of aluminum and iron oxide dust as the
consequence of the meeting of a read/write head and the surface
of a platter, they have no options save for recycling of the
materials in the old drive. If they want to restore their old
system, they must be able to restore the boot drive before
applying their backup media whatever that happens to be. Chances
are very good that the new boot drive will be larger or
different in some way from the old one.
I am not disagreeing with what you said, but it sounds
like it could be a lot of trouble to restore that system.
Martin
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive:
https://lists.debian.org/20140813152753.135fe22...@server1.shellworld.net
