Hi,
I'm looking to copy a boot disk on an old Solaris 8 system using dd. I'll bring the system down to single user mode and begin from there. I'm copying my source disk to a larger target disk. Do I need to do anything other than the 'dd' command below because the target disk is bigger?
dd if=/dev/rdsk/device-name of=/dev/rdsk/device-name bs=block-size
Thanks for your help!
My first comments would be that even in single user, the device is active. You would need to go to single user from external media, e.g.
OK> boot cdrom -s
The process may work, but the geometry of the disk may not give you a workable boot disk.
Can I presume that you are trying to create a bootable disk? For Solaris (and I last did it back to 2.6!) it was a ufsdump to tape. You can then ufsrestore it to another filesystem. You would first have to prepare the disk by booting to single user from CD and using format to slice it up (we didn't have Veritas or anything) but then there's more about devices to be cleaned up & regenerated because the hardware was different on the recovery server etc.
It is no easy task to work through but simple to follow once we'd proved it. Alas that has all gone many years past and I cannot recall it all.
Robin
Not an ideal way to try and do it in my opinion. That would just copy the existing partition (slice) size to the new drive and wouldn't therefore gain you any new space.
I would connect the drive to the existing system, use 'format' to set the VTOC including any swap space required, 'newfs' the slice(s), 'ufsdump' piped to 'ufsrestore' to transfer the data, and write a boot block to the drive to make it bootable. Then boot from the new drive.
How many filesystems are on the drive? Just one?