Cloning Novell Partitions

First of all, make sure, that your target disk has no partition on it.
That’s because it’s easier to find out the Device File Name later on.

This description is based on OpenSuSE 10.3 Live CD.

When booting from Linux Live CD, choose language (F2) and screen resulution (Text based).
In the boot parameter line, type in “init 3” without quotes.
Then press enter to boot the system.
When boot process has finished, you will get a prompt “Linux login”.
Enter root and press enter.
Now you will get a command line prompt like this “linux:~ #”, which means you’re loged in as root.
Linux uses devices like harddisks just like a file. So there is a file like “/dev/hda” or something like that, we have to figure out.
This can be done by typing in the following at the command prompt:
hwinfo –ide | less

This shows a scrollable list of the IDE harddisks found by linux.
If you have SCSI harddisks, use –scsi instead of –ide.
Find the entry “Device File: /dev/xxx”, where xxx is the name of the device under linux, we need to use fdisk, to figure out, which drive is full and which is empty (for target).

So for this example we assume, we have IDE drives and found the line “Device File: /dev/hda” and “Device File: /dev/hdb”.
But which is our source and which the targed drive?
Ok, press q to quite the scrollable list.

Now type
fdisk -l /dev/hda

Info: -l is L in lower case for list partitions.

Ok, now you get a table printed at the screen like this:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 624 214464+ e

/dev/hda1 means, this is the primary partition on harddisk /dev/hda

What we see is, this harddisk has a used partition on it.

Now use fdisk again but at this time use hdb instead of hda, to verify, whether we use the right disk as target later on.
Type in:
fdisk -l /dev/hdb

Ok, now you get a table printed at the screen like this:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

As we can see, this harddisk is empty. No partition on it.
So we know, /dev/hdb is our target disk and /dev/hda is our source disk.
(Better you write this down for later use)

Now it’s time starting to clone the drive.

Use the following command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=128

where:
if=/dev/hda means infile (as I stated before, linux handles devices as a file)
of=/dev/hdb means outfile
bs=128 this is the block size. Depending on the block size, it may be faster or slower to clone the disk, but 128 is a good value.

After a while, you’ll get some output to the screen.
Something like this:
2516580+0 records in
2516580+0 records out
322122240 bytes (322 MB) copied, 277.182 s, 1.2 MB/s

Ok, now it’s done.
You can check, whether it’s really done, by using:
fdisk -l /dev/hdb (the target disk)

and you’ll see, it’s done !!!

You can now reboot the machine or shut it down.
For reboot type in:
reboot

For shutdown type in:
halt

I hope this will help.

On further more questions, post back.