Re: [LUG] How long should it take DD to clone a hard drive?

["Michael Mortimore" <nospamformike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The man page for dd tells you how to get progress information.

"
       Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it print
I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

              $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null& pid=$!
              $ kill -USR1 $pid; sleep 1; kill $pid
"

Of course if you've already started it then ps will give you the magic number.

On Dec 16, 2007 4:10 PM, Jason Witcher <jaydoubleyou@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have a Maxtor 160GB drive in my main machine, but it was getting a bit
> flaky - a couple of times it has come up with the 'disk boot error insert
> system disc' error (which a reboot usually sorts, but I want to sort it
> before it dies permanently!), so I've bought another 160GB drive and am
> using DD to copy the original contents over.
> My question is, how long should it take to copy a full disk? I'm doing it
> from a terminal window in a Helix boot CD, using the command dd if=/dev/hda
> of=/dev/hdd bs=1024 (where hda is the original disk, hdd the new one), with
> the original as master on the 1st IDE channel and the new disk as slave on
> the 2nd (I would have made it the master but can't reach the jumper on the
> DVD writer without dismantling the whole PC!). The PC has an AMD Athlon 64
> bit 2GHz processor and 1GB of memory.
> It's been going for about 4 hours so far with the CPU bar at the bottom
> maxed out so I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the process has hung (the PC
> itself is fine, being a Live CD it's slow, but the mouse moves around OK).
> Saying that, I'll probably post this and it'll pop up saying it's
> finished...
> Jason
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