Cloning an HD with MacOSX AND Linux partitions ?

[galgot]

Bought a 64 GB ssd , would like to clone the 60 GB hd of a Titanium on it , then put the 64 GB ssd on that very Ti. Problem, that 60 GB hd is partitioned for double boot Tiger/Debian, all beautifully installed a customized to my taste…
I’ve tried booting the Ti in firewire target mode, connected to a iMacG5 running Tiger, then on the iMac, a "diskutil list" shows the Ti hd as /dev/disk3.
So i umounted the hd, then tried doing a clone image using dd, like so :
dd if=/dev/disk3 of=RoyBattyimg.iso
but after a minute i get "dd: /dev/disk3: Input/output error"…
Anyone know a way ?

 

[Lastic]

Bought a 64 GB ssd , would like to clone the 60 GB hd of a Titanium on it , then put the 64 GB ssd on that very Ti. Problem, that 60 GB hd is partitioned for double boot Tiger/Debian, all beautifully installed a customized to my taste…
I’ve tried booting the Ti in firewire target mode, connected to a iMacG5 running Tiger, then on the iMac, a "diskutil list" shows the Ti hd as /dev/disk3.
So i umounted the hd, then tried doing a clone image using dd, like so :
dd if=/dev/disk3 of=RoyBattyimg.iso
but after a minute i get "dd: /dev/disk3: Input/output error"…
Anyone know a way ?

You might have to fiddle around with bs ( blocksize ), Clonezilla might also be an option but I haven’t used it in a dual boot setup

 

[LightBulbFun]

Bought a 64 GB ssd , would like to clone the 60 GB hd of a Titanium on it , then put the 64 GB ssd on that very Ti. Problem, that 60 GB hd is partitioned for double boot Tiger/Debian, all beautifully installed a customized to my taste…
I’ve tried booting the Ti in firewire target mode, connected to a iMacG5 running Tiger, then on the iMac, a "diskutil list" shows the Ti hd as /dev/disk3.
So i umounted the hd, then tried doing a clone image using dd, like so :
dd if=/dev/disk3 of=RoyBattyimg.iso
but after a minute i get "dd: /dev/disk3: Input/output error"…
Anyone know a way ?

when using DD in OS X you need to use sudo/be root and make sure all mounted partitions are unmounted

also I recommend bs=1m, using /dev/rdisk* rather then /dev/disk* and making your output a .img not a .iso

 

[galgot]

Thanks for the help. Some progress, kind of.
Indeed sudo is what i missed so I did :
sudo dd bs=1m if=/dev/disk3 of=RoyBattyimg.img
it started doing the image , could see the progress with Ctrl-t, but after the image was like 23 MB , it hanged there and Ctrl-t was showing me no progress but a strange message i stupidly didn’t copied before closing the terminal…
After 3/4 of an hour hanging, and that img still at 23MB i powered down the Ti. rebooted it in Tiger, disk utility showed me some disk errors. Rebooted in super-user and fsck -fy twice solved it (sight).
Booting on Debian works too, so seems the linux partition is fine.
Beginning to think I'm going to make clean double boot installs, then copy my users/docs and stuffs by hand... :/

 

[CooperBox]

How does that Debian run compared to Tiger on the Titanium? Nobody has yet shown me that a Linux distro will improve over Tiger on a PPC, so to date I can't really see the point. Perhaps you can educate me on this.

 

[galgot]

As long as you don't use "heavy" windows managers, like Mate, lastest gnomes/kdes or worst, Ubuntu unity, and install light ones like lxde, WindowMaker, or openbox, it's fine. Web browsing is as fast as on Tiger, using Iceweasel (firefox), or Midori (bit faster but buggier).
As for the point... Learning , with Jessie installed you have access to a lot of Debian linux softwares, and that's much. Fun customizing my WindowMaker to make it look the more like NextSTEP that i like very much.
In short, learning and having fun.

 

[z970]

As long as you don't use "heavy" windows managers, like Mate, lastest gnomes/kdes or worst, Ubuntu unity, and install light ones like lxde, WindowMaker, or openbox, it's fine. Web browsing is as fast as on Tiger, using Iceweasel (firefox), or Midori (bit faster but buggier).

Don't forget Xfce.

Or Epiphany. It's a lot like Safari.

As for the point... Learning , with Jessie installed you have access to a lot of Debian linux softwares, and that's much. Fun customizing my WindowMaker to make it look the more like NextSTEP that i like very much.
In short, learning and having fun.

I agree. OS X is not as nice to use, not as customizable. The potential + opportunity is smaller.

That's what's so attractive about distributions like Debian, or the OS in general. The possibilities are endless, and you're always having fun learning about everything.

For instance, I'd recommend installing preload and memcached on all new installs. Preload preloads your applications before launching them (something OS X did until Tiger), and memcached (to my understanding) economizes and caches your installed RAM. Both noticeably speed general usage up.

 

[galgot]

Indeed, thanks for reminding me of these.
I wouldn't say OSX is not as nice to use, as i'm so used to it's always easier for me there than in Linux. I love OSX, specially the old ones. But really, it's just a question of habit.
As for Linux WMs, the choice is so vast, If you add the customization possibilities, it's endless. And the range is so vast too, from fvwm to Gnome or Mate, usage can be completely different. Some WMs are work of art, others are … well dunno why they were made in the first place.

anyways, I took the HD off the Ti and plugged it to a MacBookPro via a USB adapter. The cloning using the same dd command worked fine. go figure.
Now will clone that image to the SSD.

 

[eyoungren]

I am curious…

Why not just partition the SSD, and then use Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone each partition (drive) to the SSD?

Why all the intricate Terminal command work?

 

[galgot]

As OSX doesn't see linux ext4 partition format , i doudt CCC would see it.
And there are other small invisible partitions, yaboot, swap, and other that i don't know of. Didn't tried, but as they are umountable in OSX , really doubt CCC or SuperDuper would work with these...
There are way to mount Linux drives on OSX , via macFuse and another stuff can't remember the name. But copying a Linux install that way... Mmmh .

 

[eyoungren]

As OSX doesn't see linux ext4 partition format , i doudt CCC would see it.
And there are other small invisible partitions, yaboot, swap, and other that i don't know of. Didn't tried, but as they are umountable in OSX , really doubt CCC or SuperDuper would work with these...
There are way to mount Linux drives on OSX , via macFuse and another stuff can't remember the name. But copying a Linux install that way... Mmmh .

Got you! Thanks for the clarification as I hadn't considered that.

 

[galgot]

well well, it was a longer journey than I thought it would be.
So I cloned the hd disk image on the ssd, all went fine, Ti booted fine on both Tiger and Debian.

But... : I cloned a 60GB image to a 64GB ssd. So I had a 25GB size Tiger partition and 4GB empty space at the end of the ssd partitions table. So I thought booting the Ti in target mode connected again to the MBP, I could expand the HFS+ Tiger partition on that empty 4GBs. No no... Disk Utility doesn't want to do it, nor GParted in Linux...

The image being copied block by block (dd) , apparently Disk Utility sees that Tiger partition as being on a 60GB disk, while there is still 4GB empty, nor did it agree to format that partition... And GParted can format to HFS+ but CAN'T expand an HFS+ partition...

Only way I managed to have all these 28GB for my Tiger partition was to :

-Boot again the Ti in target mode.

-Connect it via FireWire to a MacBookPro running Debian.

-Use GParted to erase both the 25GB HFS+ Tiger partition and the 4GB empty space, and reformate both into a single HFS+ partition, not touching at all the Linux, Swap, yaboot partitions that are at the beginning of the ssd .

-Reboot the MacBookPro in SnowLeo (that one has triple install 10.6/Debian/Window7, very handy). I had that 28GB empty HFS+ mounted on the desktop.

-Use CCC to clone my 25GB Tiger partition I still had from the 60GB disk image , to that empty 28GB HFS+ partition.

So CCC was very helpful in the end
Posting this here for the sake of documentation, but maybe there are other easier way to do it.
Anyways, that Ti is very snappy with a ssd