I have the task of making a copy of one old HDD to another. The original is not S.M.A.R.T. enabled and is 80GB in size. As it is formatted as an MBR disk it has a block size of 512 MB and is a bootable disk. The recipient disk is the larger of the two and was totally blank but I have made a 80 GB partition at the start to receive the copy. When completed, this too, must be bootable.
After looking around it seems to me that ‘dd’ is the tool to use but would appreciate some clarification on some of the switches. The command I have found and am looking at is this
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$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of /dev/sdd bs=2048 count=32 && sync
but think it needs some modification for my purposes.
Clarification please on the following points.
I am assuming that is the first partition on the donor drive. If is not, can
is, I understand, the second partition the recipient drive. How does dd know that this is a partition on a separate drive?
As both drives are MBR drives should the block count be 512 as opposed to 2048?
I have no idea and cannot seem to find the purpose of
I have also seen
being suggested for the same purpose. What is the ‘count’ for and which is correct please?
It seems that while running the dd command some of the data is written to a cache and the the addition of sync is to ensure that that cache is emptied prior to the command completion. Is this a correct reading of the phrase?