Proper Cloning

[dubesor]

It took forever, but I rescued everything from a corrupt drive onto a brand new one with ddrescue.

I would now like to clone my healthy drive to have a 2nd copy of everything. I was told this is the syntax to use:

dd if=/dev/src of=/dev/dst bs=512000 count=2000000

Just wanted to double check if that's correct? ... would hate to do anything to jeopardize the data on this new drive.

[drc]

No need for count if you are cloning the entire drive

[dubesor]

i ran my command: dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512000
(making double sure the source and destination drives were right)

but now dd just sort of hangs, there's a flashing cursor, but no other output.
is that normal?

i know for sure linux could see both drives, it showed them both to me in /dev/ ...
* the 'source' new drive that has my recovered data was listed as sdb, sdb1, sdb5, sdb6 (same partition layout as the old failed drive that was previously ddrescued onto it)
* the 2nd brand new drive was listed as sda.
* there were no other sd_ entries shown, nor any other drives connected to motherboard.

[drc]

Yep

[mydata.pl]

'bs' switch states: read and write BYTES bytes at a time
So if you change default 512 to 512000 dd can hang sometimes
And for checking what is going on with dd you have to use kill command:
kill -USR1 [dd PID]

[dubesor]

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize when I ran it that dd is just kind of silent when it runs. But I believe it finished the clone job correctly.