Solved Cloning a FreeBSD 10.1 disk

A

apolinsky

I have a failing disk that I have been unsuccessful in my cloning attempts. I have tried to use Clonezilla 2.2.4-12 or dd using dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M. In either case the 'cloned' disk is unrecognized. I am assuming that the boot loader is not being copied correctly, but I could be wrong. Does anyone have an alternate suggestion?

Thank you.
 
What do you mean by "unrecognized"? If the filesystems are readable on the original disk, copy just those partitions rather than the whole disk.
 
That is what has been bothering me. The original disk is a 200 GB gig one, the replacement is 250. When I ran either dd or clonedisc, the standard three partitions were created with the original sizes. (I was willing to re-create the remaining disk later.) I don't understand why I am getting the 'unrecognized' message at boot time. What I may try is to manually create the three partitions, and then do a dump and restore from the old to the new disc, but I guess, I've been rather confused by the entire process.

Alan
 
OK, well noted, this constructive!

It's understandable that someone is kind of "caught" in his troublesome situation. It's important, however, to understand that, no matter how pressing it may feel, just blabbering on and on does not help.

There are thousands of users here and chances are that there are some who actually can help - IF you help them to help you.

So, LISTEN! Again: LISTEN! Stop a second, calm down - and LISTEN!

wblock@ is an extremely knowledgeable guy in disk-related stuff. He asked you the very question that is relevant and that also struck me immediately:
What do you mean by "unrecognized"?
Click to expand...

We can't help you if you don't give us the information we deem relevant and significant. Simple as that.

Apologies if you feel my post to be harsh but I've come over situations like this one again and again. You see, many of us want to help, actually many of us are here to help, but we can't help, if people talk and talk and talk and just don't give us the information we need to help them.

Rest assured that you are in very good hands with wblock@, but you need to actually read what he says - and respond properly.
 
I would definitely suggest not to use dd for this, best practice is to use it when both disks are the same size. You'll probably save yourself a lot of time using dump and restore. If you can access both HD's at the same time you can even apply this in one command.

So, for example: # dump 0f - /dev/vtbd1 | restore -rf - (where your current location would be the mountpoint of the new slice).

This is of course assuming that you're using UFS.
 
ShelLuser said:
I would definitely suggest not to use dd for this, best practice is to use it when both disks are the same size. You'll probably save yourself a lot of time using dump and restore. If you can access both HD's at the same time you can even apply this in one command.

So, for example: # dump 0f - /dev/vtbd1 | restore -rf - (where your current location would be the mountpoint of the new slice).

This is of course assuming that you're using UFS.
Click to expand...

I second this post. In particular I have very poor experience with Clonezilla which was all but useless to me except for cloning the disks of the same sizes and types which contain legacy MBR. I wish there was still Frenzy http://frenzy.org.ua/eng/ that was a damn good tool.
 
Using -b64 with dump(8) can double the backup speed. Still, it would be nice to get more information about the exact problem and disk layout first.
 
I thought I would follow up with the correct solution to the problem, but before I do that, let me mention an old New Yorker cartoon, with a commenting that on the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog. I'm a recently retired programmer, who started a computer career many years ago. I am not a neophyte. The two choices I initially used, Clonezilla and dd evidently DID work, and I would recommend with some caveats going the Clonezilla route, as long as the most recent one is used, and the disks are the same size. There is a reason that the disk was 'unrecognized'. It had to do with the strapping on the pin block. With the larger, IDE drives, strapping a disk as 'master' or 'slave' leads to problems, while using the 'cable select' position eliminates those problems. Being an old Unix guy, I knew that 'dump' and 'restore' MIGHT be another way to go; the definitive book of backups, Unix Backups and Recovery by W Curtis Preston touts it extensively. Once I was able to have the disc recognized by the system, I was able to replace the failing disk with the newly cloned one.

Alan
 
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