Update MBR of new drive after cloning
Let's assume that :
- Your destination partition table is correctly defined
- Sizes of
sda5
andsdc5
matches (otherwise it would not make sense, or you will need to rungparted
to resize the filesystem ifsda5
is smaller thansdc5
)
You will probably want to copy just the first 440 bytes of the MBR since the partition table is whithin the MBR sector (see wikipedia entries (en) or (fr) with dd
command examples).
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1 count=440
Anyway, gparted
allows you to easily and quickly copy data between partitions since it analyzes filesystems and only copies the bytes needed, so I would recommend gparted against dd
.
The only exception would be in the case you want to recover a broken drive, in that case I would recommend you to extract data with dd_rescue
which is more resilient to errors than dd
, probably faster, too.
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Jason
Full stack Python & Java web dev in sunny/snowy Maine. Other interests include geospatial data and puzzles
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Jason over 1 year
I just cloned the Linux partition of my laptop to be used on the desktop.
However, this was just a straight DD execution, and the MBR of the new drive is not affected. How can I change the new drive to be bootable?
The exact DD command I used was
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdc5
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irrational John almost 12 yearsUsing
dd
to copy a partition could, I suppose be done. But it involves tedious details which I would never want to mess with unless I had no other choice. Why not boot the Ubuntu Live CD or USB and usegparted
to copy the partition? That way the partition table in the MBR will be properly updated as well as any other file system parameters that might need to be "tweaked" as a result of the relocation. -
ish almost 12 yearsPlease include exact
dd
command line used in question.
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