On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 13:43, bruce wrote: > i have a drive on a system that appears to be ready to die. > > i'm looking for a solution that will allow me to create a copy/backup of the > drive to another (2nd) drive on a 2nd system across the network. > > so: > system1 > drive1 (primary drive - ready to die) > > > system2 > drive1 - (master/primary drive0 > drive2 - (dup drive) > > i want to be able to extract the information from the drive1 on the 1st > system, and to copy the information to the drive2 on the 2nd system. > > i'd like to know how to setup the 2nd drive on the 2nd system, and how to > make the whole process work. my goal is to be able to take the 2nd drive > from the 2nd system, and to place it into the 1st system, and to keep on > cruising.... > > any thoughts/pointers/etc.. would be helpful. i've been looking via google. > partimage looks like it could work. i'm looking to create a process that i > can follow that works. can't afford to screw this up. > > the 1st drive in system1 is about to die. >From system1: Boot system1 with the install CD with 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt. Bring up the network interface but skip mounting the existing system. From the command prompt: dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda |ssh system2 dd of=/dev/hdb (use appropriate /dev/sd? names for scsi instead of ide) Go have a long lunch - it takes a while. This will fail if you have any spots on the drive that normal retries won't correct, but it is the easiest approach so you might as well try it first if the drives are identical. Or, at the expense of an extra hardware swap, move the disk to system1 as the 2nd drive before the copy, then swap into the first position. The copy would go a little faster locally. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
