[Fedora-livecd-list] Re: LiveCD wiping root partition?

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 06:27 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Michel Salim wrote:
> > Any reason why dd is preferred over, say, tar? The latter would be much
> > safer. And files would not have to be moved to their final partitions after
> > 'dd' too.
> 
> seeking (cdrom and disk).  Lots slower (5X?).  I suspect that file level copy 
> (tar) will be the long term answer for the flexible general case.  Though I also 
> suspect the much faster dd will be part of the long term answer as well for the 
> typical case (i.e. formatting / as ext3, and no separate /usr).
> 
> For example, on my system, using the existing 4.0G dd, the copy takes 299s. 
> Using my turboLiveInst patch, I can shave that down to 250s.  Using tar however 
> to copy the 85896 files, took 1247s.  And you also need to throw in another 30s 
> or so for the format that isn't required in the dd case.  Maybe(??) there is 
> some more efficient way to copy those 85K files than the ( tar cpsf - | tar xpsf 
> - ) that I used for that trial.

Yeah, I gave the copy approach a quick test before leaving for vacation
and it was taking quite a while.  Still want to make sure that wasn't
due to something stupid in my test setup, but it's looking less
promising as an approach for speeding things up.

Jeremy