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Stephen
Asked: 2021-01-19 23:00:40 +0800 CST

where is the disk capacity stored?

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In short, if I do dd disk-to-disk (e.g. /dev/sda to /dev/sdb), is the capacity of the whole disk also copied?

For example, if sda is actually 1TB and sdb 2TB, after the dd, which would a Linux system regard sdb as, 1TB or 2TB?

I assume that the disk capacity is recorded in a separate ROM or small non-volatile storage, not in any sector of the disk. Or, maybe a couple of sectors of a physical disk might be always reserved.

I'd like to migrate systems on an old 1TB hard disk to a new 2TB one with minimal pain. The old disk won't be used. I thought dd might do. The only part that I wasn't sure is if I do dd & the size of the disk capacity is ever copied just like the partition table, the new 2TB disk would become 1TB. I wanted to make sure before actually doing dd.

My Google search was not fruitful, so finally I decided to post a question here.

If all the systems were Linux, I'd consider rsync partition-to-partition & grub-install. However, unfortunately, I have one Windows and do not have a Windows installation usb. I am not sure how to re-install and/or reconfigure Windows boot loader after rsync.

hard-drive capacity dd

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    HDD size in actual "physical" terms of platter/heads is stored in a internal ROM but it is not user-accessible. Modern HDDs (and SSDs) expose an abstraction called LBA (logical block addressing), which basically tell the OS how many user-addressable sectors the disk has.

    dd simply reads until EOF (end-of-file), which can either be the end of disk or partition. Copying your entire 1 TB disk to the 2 TB one with dd will end with a maximum of 1 TB partitioned space on you destination disk - ie: the original MBR/GPT does not know anything about the additional space at the end.

    Think about a small box put inside a larger one: object inside the smaller box does not "know" anything about the available outer space. At the same time, to use the additional space provided by your 2 TB disk you need to modify the original MBR/GPT creating additional partitions or expanding the last one.

    When copying at user level via tools as cp or rsync, you do not need this simply because your 2 TB disk will (hopefully) be already partitioned to use all the available space, with the filesystem sized according.

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