backup the whole hard disk using PowerQuest Partition Magic 8

['chris']

hi

can I backup 1:1 the whole hard disk using PowerQuest Partition Magic 8 ?
I mean to copy from the Master 80GB Disk to the
SLAVE 80GB Disk.
both disks are installed on the same computer.

on the Master Disk I have 2 OS:
1.) freeBSD 5.3
2.) linux SUSE 9.1

kind regards
christoph

[Hein van den Heuvel · Accepted solution]

For two equal sized disks, just dd the blocks?!
For example:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=256K

Also, just google ( www.google.com/linux ) for +clone -network, and you'll readily find hints like:

http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/2002-October/045826.html

You might want to boot a memory-only linux (any linux) to have the input be clean.

fwiw,
Hein.

[Steven E. Protter]

Not familiar with this program. I would say if its a partition manager, probably yes.

In one of your prior questions, I posted this reliable methodology as well:

Get Symmantec Norton Ghost. Boot dos(win 98 rescue for example). Run ghost. Ghost will detect the drives and has menu driven options that allows full disk copy.

SEP

[Andrew Cowan]

You can copy any type of partition using Partition Magic, and to answer SEP's question: Partition Magic and Norton Ghost do pretty much exactly the same thing, its just a matter of which interface you prefer.

I would not advise dd'ing a partition from one disk to another simply because if there are any bad sectors/corruption on the source disk, it will duplicate the corruption. Its also quite wasteful if there is a lot of free space in the source filesystem.

The two suggestions I would make is either to buy a full copy of Ghost/PM, or if you just want to do this one copy, get a copy of Powerquest's disk copier software. Its much simpler and cheaper, and simply offers a one touch disk duplication, and offers feature such as copying to a larger disk with partition resize.

['chris']

thanks to ALL !

I think Symantec Norton Ghost is the best and easiest solution.