Hi,

I would like to clone an Amiga hard drive. The new drive is double the
size of the old drive. This drive will have my / and usr partition on it. The
system is a production server and takes over a 100,000 hits a day. So, I
will need to make this work the first time with the least amount of down
time. I think that I can clone it, but there are a couple of things that I
am not sure of. There seemed to be alot of talk about this on several
message boards lately, but none have answered some of my questions. I am
going to give an example of how I think I should do this, please feel free
to jump in and let me know if there is an easier way, or let me know if I
am flat out wrong.

1) partition the hard drive with HDToolBox.
(what I am unsure of here is on the new hard drive what do I set the
future root partition dostype to. 0x4e425207 or 0x4e425507)

2) use newfs to put a file system on it

3) copy the files to the new drive.
(This is where I am really unsure. In most examples that I have seen they
say to use dump|restore. but I can't find an example that does not use a
tape backup system. Also, I am not sure if this method will work with
port-amiga. Plus, I don't have enough room left on the old hard drive to
store a dump file. So, I thought that I would do is:

cd /usr
tar -clf - / > root.tar
mkdir /mnt/root
mount /dev/sd1a /mnt/root
cd /mnt/root
tar -xvpf /usr/root.tar
cd /usr
rm root.tar
mkdir /mnt/usr
mount /dev/sd1e /mnt/usr
pax -rw -pe . /mnt/usr
umount /mnt/root
umount /mnt/usr

Then restart the computer after removing the old hard drive.

Will this work?

I should note that the first partition on this hard drive will be for the
Amiga OS, and the hard drive was low level formated with a Mac.

Also is it really important to burn in a hard drive? I have seen several
examples of scripts to do this lately.

Thanks,
Al