cloning a hard drive with linux dd

I was cloning a windows 98 machine! I know ugh ugh, but I had to do it, I was upgrading an old compaq with a 8GB quantum 5.25" drive to a Maxtor 40GB running at 7,200 RPM.

I did not have a IDE cable with two connectors, only the factory cables which were single channel.

so my plan to use a knoppix boot disk was out the window.

I tracked down hal91which has a great single floppy distro, with tada: dd!

this is what i used.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

via
I forgot to match the jumpers, so initially the reboot didn't detect the operating system. After setting the jumpers on the drive to master, it was OK.

quite a difference, the upgrade was tricky but it paid off.

HAL91

You need at least a 386 machine (fpu not necessary) with 8 mb ram to run HAL91. The entire system runs in ram, so you can remove the floppy after booting. The kernel supports IDE hard disks and ATAPI cdrom drives. Supported filesystems are ext2, iso9660 and vfat, optional encryption using AES is possible. Limited support for ethernet cards (NE2000 only) is also included. Support for scsi adapters, parallel zip drive and other ethernet cards is possible by loading kernel modules from an optional package (see below).