Cloning a 500gig drive with DD

Find a live linux distro and open a shell/konsole.

Type hdparm -i /dev/sda(lowercase i) to get extended drive information where the  drive number is specified by sda.
sda is the first drive, sdb the second, sdc the third and so forth.

Alternatively use smartctl -i /dev/sda or sdb or whatever your device is called that you need to identify. This will give the serial number which is useful if both drives are identical.


Type dd if=/dev/* of=/dev/** bs=32256
* refers to the source drive that you wish to clone, sda in my case and ** refers to the destination or empty drive.

My entry was : dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M bs refers to block size by the way, if you don't specify it DD will use 512 by default and will take a very long time indeed.
In my case it took just over 2 hours to clone a 500gig sata hard drive.

Disappearing Mask Function in Vegas Pro

Racked my brain for quite a while and after lots of searching turned up nothing except a few people asking the same question. I was convinced I'd turned off a view option but finally figured it out, the software allows the time line to be resized across the mask/position section of the pan/crop areas. When I'd reattached the window that resizing overlapped onto the mask/position area. Resizing that area will again allow you to select the masking option.