Upgrading hard disks in iMac

[Norberto Quintanar]

It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command
in Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination
drive in the system so that they don't affect the boot. If you have a
SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher.
With IDE, you probably need to put the drives in as secondaries on
either channel, assuming your CD-ROM is the primary device on the
second chain. On our system, we made the source ID 4 and the
destination ID 6. Verify this using dmesg: 

[root@tux root]# dmesg | grep sd
Kernel command line: ro root=/dev/sda1 console=ttyS0 
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi0, channel 0, id 4, lun 0
Attached scsi disk sdc at scsi0, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 2069860 512-byte hdwr sectors (1060 MB)
 sda: sda1 sda2
SCSI device sdb: 8388315 512-byte hdwr sectors (4295 MB)
 sdb: sdb1 sdb2
SCSI device sdc: 8388315 512-byte hdwr sectors (4295 MB)
 sdc: unknown partition table
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on sd(8,1), internal journal
[root@gabrielle root]# 

 

Notice that with this copy method, we don't need to worry about
partitions, boot sectors, etc. To copy sdb to sdc: 

[root@tux root]# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc &
[1] 612
[root@tux root]# 

 

The ampersand throws the task in the background. You may then copy to
other destination drives if you wish. Again, this copies everything
on the drive, so you can image any operating system. One cheapie way
to recover a server is to image the hard drive in this way. The SIDs
(Windows) will be identical as well. You will be at the exact same
state as the time of imaging. No worries about open files, as long as
you shut down the OS properly on the drive first. This method is not
suitable for cloning Windows (NT and above) workstations that will be
up at the same time, unless you feel comfortable changing the SIDs.

Good Luck :)



--- "Richard D. Gill" <Richard.Gill@math.uu.nl> wrote:
> > I am going to upgrade the hard disk in my iMac (2001 model) to a
> larger
> > one. Is there a way I can take everything that I currently have
> on the
> > existing hard disk and put it into the new one? I only have YDL 3
> > installed on that drive. I would like to be able to copy
> everything, 
> the
> > applications, settings, data etc. to the new one.
> 
> Diego, how are the disks formatted? apple or linux?
> Do you have a spare external drive so you can copy stuff to a
> safe place and put it back later?
> 
> If the partitions of interest are hfs, and if you have a mac osx
> bootable cdrom, and if you have an external hard drive, you could
> like me
> use the free OS X program "Carbon Copy Cloner" which can copy an
> entire
> mac os partition, preserving everything... And that can be done
> because
> mac osx is basically unix and in unix this kind of thing is more or
> less easy...
> 
> I'll be interested to hear how to do this "under linux".
> 
> Richard
> 
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>
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