Saturday 25 June 2016

sfdisk: cannot open /dev/sdb read-write

I have Marius's excelent mdadm Cheat Sheet bookmarked (http://www.ducea.com/2009/03/08/mdadm-cheat-sheet/). Well, it is really a crib sheet. A great reference of mdadm, used to manage and monitor software RAID devices.

However, I had a problem with the following (on kubuntu) when trying to copy the partitions from a current drive (sda), to a new drive (sdb).

sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: Permission denied

sfdisk: cannot open /dev/sdb read-write


Simply add 'sudo' to both statements for this to work.

sudo sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sudo sfdisk /dev/sdb


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