From a terminal window: do not mount either drive!

Bit copying seems to be the easiest way to create a new backup drive with all the partitions identical to the main drive, but make sure your filesystem is OK first.

Change device names to the ones your system actually uses. In my case, my main drive is /dev/hda (base), the partitions are /dev/hda1 (/boot) and /dev/hda5 (main/swap), the reason why main/swap is on hda5 is because that was the Debian default.

Note that LVM information is not used on either of the next commands. e2fsck is "check hard drive;" it's a Linux equivalent for Windows SCANDISK. dd is a basic bit-copy drive copying command with no error checking, which is why I recommend doing a disk check first.

# e2fsck -f -p /dev/hda5  

# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd conv=noerror,sync bs=4k

You should now have two identical drives. The bad news is that LVM filesystem can't have two identical drives open simultaneously.

Next: Dealing with LVM UUID »