[Suns-at-Home] SunOs - Disk clone

[Geoff Blake]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008, martin nichols wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I wonder if anyone can point me in the right direction.
>
> I'm trying to keep an an early 1990's IPX based PCB CAD system operational. I
> have another complete IPX which can be canibalised for hardware spares, but
> no copy of SunOs 4.1.3 or the CAD package that runs on it. Even If I had I'm
> not sure that I would be able to install and configure it without any
> manuals.
>
> Both IPX's have had the NVRAM hack and now have a 1/2AA lithium cell that
> should keep the clock ticking until I'm in a box!
>
> My question is can I somehow copy the entire disk so that in the event of the
> disk drive failing I can rebuild the system.
> The drives in both the IPXs are the same - SUN424.
> I have an Archive Viper QIC150 tape drive.
> An Exabyte EXB-8500 tape drive.
> A SUN CD ROM drive.
> A non-SUN SCSI external drive box and some SCSI disks in the 1 to 2 GByte size
> range.
> Network cables +AUI -> 10baseT adapters.
>
> Any help would be much appreciated.
> Thanks.
>
> Regards to all on Suns@home.
> Martin Nichols, Surrey UK.
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>
dd is your friend, it will enable you to duplicate a disk

if you run:

dd if=/dev/sd(0,1) of=/dev/sd(0,2) bs=18k

you will copy everything from the device which is sd(0,1) to
the device which is sd(0,2). I don't know how SunOS copes with
copying from a mounted drive, so it might be a good idea to boot
and run the system from a third drive. It also may be a good idea
to write protect your source drive if that is easy to do.

do a "man dd" and read it carefully, like most UNIXy things there
is no "are you sure", "are you really sure" and "are you
absolutely certain" steps and if you get the disks the wrong way
around.......

HTH

Geoff
-- 
    Geoff Blake G8GNZ      located  near  Chelmsford,  Essex,  U.K.
    Please reply to:      geoff(at)palaemon(dot)demon(dot)co(dot)uk
    Using Linux on  Intel & Linux  or NetBSD on Sun Sparc platforms

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