[Suns-at-Home] SunOs - Disk clone

[Sandwich Maker]

i think bob nailed it, except for a few comments i can add --

" From: Bob Smart <bsmart@xecu.net>
" 
" []
" 
" 2) Get a disk of sufficient size (bigger is always fine) in an external 
" chassis and hook it up to the system (I believe in shutting the system 
" down to connect up a SCSI disk)

i recall pretty clearly that if you didn't shut the system down - or
at least stop-a it - you'd glitch the scsi bus hard enough to lock the
system up, forcing a reboot anyway.

" 3) Partition the new disk and newfs the partitions.
" 
" 4) mount the partitions (I usually had mount points /sd1a, /sd1d, 
" /sd1e, /sd1f, /sd1g, /sd1h already created on my standard image)
" 
" 5) For each partition cd to the partition and use
" dump 0cf - . | (cd <newpartition>; restore xf -)
" 
" Do this for each partition.

i'd change this to
dump 0cf - <oldpartition> | (cd <newpartition> && restore xf -)
or better
cd <newpartition> && dump 0cf - <oldpartition> | restore xf -
[note the double ampersands]
to make the restore contingent on a successful cd.  otherwise if by
some mischance you forgot or bungled steps 3 & 4 the cd could fail
and you could end up with the files restored somewhere you didn't
want and where they might even be a problem.

ask me how i know this...	:^/

" 6) If you plan on booting the new disk as an external disk (usually sd1 
" or sd2) then edit the fstab file to change the partition names from sd0 
" []
" 
" 7) Look at the installboot man page to get the syntax of the command 
" right then run this command on the new disk

there's no law that says you can't have 2 or 3 bootable drives hooked
up, with essentially duplicate contents except for fstab.  this would
in fact be the surest way to guarantee you can get the system running
again if/when your original disk fails, and cutover takes only as long
as a reboot.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh@an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought