> That is a lot of cpu use and I think those suggesting the use of the > Rescue disk I have this: > The Rescue disk does not have dd. It also lacks RAM and will NOT work. I > was getting email and doing things with my computer while dd was sending > it to the other Hard Drive. > > It worked just fine. > > > > Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI What lacks RAM? I'm assuming you mean your computer. Anyhow, not important at this point. On to more important issues. More accurately you should say "So far it is working just fine". Imagine photocopying a book. You photocopy the front of the book, the foreword, the table of content with the list of chapters and headings, then start photocopying the chapters. While you are doing this you continue to make changes to the book. You are now at page 20 of 100 photocopying away. All at the same time you change the chapter name of the chapter on page 45 (now that doesn't match what you photocopied in the beginning). You remove a paragraph on page 15 (but you already photocopied it so it's already in your copy). You delete page 19 so now your book is from page 1-99 but you already copied that page so it's on the copy. You update your alphabetical index at the end of the book when you are up to page 50. So the index tells you that something is on page 20 but it's really page 21 in your copy because you deleted page 19 after photocopying that page so your updated copy has it on page 20 but it is on page 21 on the original revision. And it goes on. Now dd is doing the exact same thing. It's copying stuff over complete with pointers to where to find certain data and pointers to free space on the drive. That is written at the beginning of the copying process because it resides there. Yet you are still using the system so what was marked as unallocated space is in use by the time dd gets to it. And what was marked as used disk space when dd copied over the index is now unallocated space because you deleted something. It can make a real mess of things. Problems may manifest themselves pretty quickly, later on, or apparently not at all if you are lucky (but that will not mean that stuff isn't misaligned with the index because it's impossible for that NOT to happen given your scenario). The choice is yours. Run with it and keep your fingers crossed or exercise an once of prevention now to avoid a potential pound of headaches later on and redo the process using a live CD as previously explained. Or pursue someone else's advice on how to ghost a drive onto another one (entirely different approach than dd and certainly more efficient if this is something you will be repeating somewhat regularly - but again you would not do that on a live system...). Jacques B.
