Paulvanjaarsveld.com

Just a shoutout to any visitors. I know I am really supposed to update this site a little more, but my life is just so hectic for the last couple of months, I really did not have time to do it. The funny thing is, I have noticed the site is getting lots and lots of visitors, and most of the traffic comes from people browsing with Firefox. (Amen!) I don´t know if it´s because of the linux tips that I have that everybody comes here, but it kinda strange. I want to ask you, how did you get here and whate were you looking for? Would you be so kind to send me a message on the contact page and let me know? Thanks!

This site is pulling so much traffic, I am going to put some adsense ads up.

Note to self. use dd to clone a mounted live linux operating system.

Primary drive is internal and secondary us external USB for intance:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1024000

The destination drive must be bigger or identical size. If you are moving to a larger size drive, then create identical partitions eg sda1, sda5 and sda6. (thrUse dralconfix etc to see how partitions are setup or run mount from shell.)

then run the following commands:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=102400
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdb5 bs=102400
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sdb6 bs=102400

Took less than 60 minutes cloning 80Gig to 120 Gig external. When disk was placed in laptop, it booted up perfectly. i am now working on it.

IMPORTANT. If you are moving to bigger partitions, remember that dd made an exact clone, and the filesystems on the new drive will still think they are the old size.

use df -h to check this. When I ran the command the first time, the old sizes were reported.

after resizing, this is what mine looked like:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              20G   12G  7.1G  62% /
/dev/sda6              86G   48G   38G  56% /home
tmpfs                 948M     0  948M   0% /dev/shm

For example, the /dev/sda1 which is the root partition reported 12G size and only 35MB free. Synaptic did not want to install any new stuff, and that is why. It was still thinking it´s on the smaller drive.

I had to resize those partitions to the correct size, by using resize2fs /dev/sda1 20G

After doing both sda1 and sda6, all space was allocated and I could go on and install the new packages with synaptic with no further problems because I had 7.1 G free.

NOTE: I only told the partitions their actual size by doing this, because they still thought they were small partitions due to dd making such a complete clone. So don´t think if you resize a partition into a size you don´t have that there will appear some magical extra space.