>> I can put the two drives in one machine, but dd will not copy them
>> because it is the active drive,

I don't get what you mean here.  I've never had any trouble.  Can you
give exact commands and resposnes you're trying?

>> I also don't know how to copy the boot block on the vax

It's on the disk; copying the whole disk will copy that too.

> In that case, what you will have to do is create a new boot block on
> the drive [...], then fdisk to create partitions, newfs to create
> file systems, and cpio to copy the filesystems from one to the other.

fdisk?  This is port-vax, not port-i386.

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