Unix disk clone
 

Hi all,

I wonder if someone can answer a quick question for me please?

I have to clone a pc and the database contained on it. What is the best way of doing this please? As mentioned in the title the machine is running unix and some very specialised S/W.

Do a back-up onto DAT drive. Am I correct in assuming the backup is just the data, or is the backup of the entire disk?

I was thinking that I need to add the second drive to the pc that needs cloning, obviously changing the SCSI id. Not knowing anything about unix, is there a simple command that I can run to do this for me. I don't really want to add any additional software to the machine.

Copy the entire disk.

Following this restore the backup (or will this be done as part of the cloning process)

Any help would be greatly appreciated and sorry top ask some questions that might appear daft, Phill

Phill,

What flavour of unix is it running? Are you literally wanting to take a complete image of what is on the disk, put it on another disk so that you could put that disk in another pc and it would boot up exactly the same?

Andy

Good question, I'll check mate and come back to you on that one ;)

Yes I want to take my existing pc and make a spare clone of it, with all the data, etc, etc. I intend to use the spare machine after it has been cloned.

Thanks Phill

Phill,

You could try using a disk cloning utility but you would have to be careful of this as because it is unix the drivers required to operate on the new machine may be different unless you are putting the image on an identical machine, hardware wise.

Andy

The machines are identical or thereabouts, both Compaq and look identical. I'm sure there are slight difference like processor speed, but will this matter?

Thanks Phill

Andy,

Just asked someone to look and they are saying :-

Machine: SCO UNIX 386
Operating System: SCO UNIX 3.2v4.2 i386
Database: SYBASE

Hope this helps mate, Phill

wow ... you must be the last person using SCO :)

Doesn't sybase use raw devices ? Have to be really careful if so as most 'file' utils won't work.

dd is probably your best bet.

Steve

Steve,

You are talking machine code to me mate!! :rolleyes:

The server we are using controls a very old analogue cable TV system, that was probably invented in the 198?s. I know for a fact I started working an a system similiar to this in 1990 :eek:

Don't know about sybase using raw devices, as I not sure what you mean?

Won't something like Ghost be able to copy the disks? I'm asking these questions for someone in my IT department, as they've got the resposibility of cloning the disk ;)

Any clues what we can do?

Phill

I was going to suggest dd from the outset on this one, and I don't know why it hasn't been mentioned before...

Something like:

dd if=/dev/hd0 of=/dev/hd1

...should do something like a direct, byte-for-byte duplication of HD0 to HD1.

See Dd (Unix - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) for more info...

Would we need to format the second hard drive prior to running this command? If so, what command would that be please?

Thanks Phill