Hi folks, Debian Can I apply dump and restore commands as follow to clone a partition from Drive-A to Drive-B, connected as slave Drive-A is the system drive Drive-B is a brand drive, partitioned but without formatted # dump –f - /var | (cd /mnt/var; restore –rf -) /var is the 'var' partition of Drive-A /mnt/var is the mount point of an empty partition of Drive-B Kindly advise whether the above syntax is correct TIA B.R. satimis

You need to make a filesystem on the new drive and mount it first, but your command looks fine to me. Your pipe will survive changing directories and behave as expected. I would use (and have a few times) "cp -a" or "tar cpf", but that's mostly because the filesystems I use don't have dump/restore. Dump's only advantage seems to be support for incremental backups, but I can do that with rsync, which I need anyway for Gentoo.

Hi Jake2, Tks for your advice. I'll create filesystem and mount all partitions excluding 'swap' first. I'll also consider following command line cp -a -x /boot /mnt/boot etc. OR find -print | cpio -pdmv /mnt/ for all partitions simultaneiously. Hoping that there will be no syntax error B.R. satimis