cloning a drive [was: war story]

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Wed Jul 27 05:05:29 UTC 2011


So I replaced the 1.5T Seagate 7200.11 drive with a 2T WD EARS drive.

I cloned the old disk onto the new drive with a dd (took about 9
hours).

Then I remembered: EARS drives secretly have large sectors.  (Although
the standard allows drives to declare larger-than-512 sectors, WD
chose not to do this.  Dumb.)

So my cloned drive would have bad performance for the half of the
partitions that were not aligned on an actual sector boundary.

Recent Linux distros align partitions on large boundaries to get around
this problem, and a worse one for SSDs.

Anyway, wiped out the partition table on the new drive and used
gparted to create larger but similar partitions.  I'm now dd'ing each
partition to do the cloning.

I'll do an resize2fs to make each filesystem use its whole partition.

Then I'll boot from a grub disk to boot the system (grub is probably
not bootable on the new disk) and then ask grub to re-install itself.

Is there a better way?
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