[TriLUG] image of hard drive question

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2012, James Jones wrote:

> Here is a question from a newbie at hard drive backups. ( 
> ME ) I am planning to create a mirror image of my windows 
> xp hard drive to place on a shelf for use if original hard 
> drive dies.

I used to do this. but I've found problems with doing this. 
It seems that the oil in the motor or the head arm gets 
sticky on extended storage. About half (5 out of 10) of my 
10yr old 10-30G drives didn't start up when I tried them 
this year. I now keep my images on active hard disks, or at 
least on disks that get plugged in every month or so.

To save space, I mount the image, fill the empty space with 
zeroes (dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.zero;rm zero.zero) and then 
gzip the image.

> The question -- If original hard drive dies, is there any 
> known software that will NOT run from the mirrored hard 
> drive? ( assuming nothing else in original computer has 
> changed )??

I assume you're asking if the computer can tell the 
difference between the original and a dd copy. No. I do this 
all the time, for backup and restore and when moving to a 
bigger or new disk.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!