Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Mark]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 18:32 -0800, Patton Echols wrote:
>> I have a failing hard drive that boots WinXP for one of my work machines.
>>
>> I want to clone the drive while it's still alive and run from the
>> clone.  I had expected to use dd and was reading to try and see if there
>> are challenges I am unaware of. The comments to this article:
>>
>> http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/clone-a-hard-drive-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/
>>
>> say that it will not work if the drives have different geometries.
>>

Not exactly - the article doesn't say anything like that, one of the
comments, which is not entirely accurate, does.  If you just dd from
one drive to the other, and they have different geometries, SOME
things won't wind up in the right place because a sector by sector
copy (which dd can/does do) won't necessarily put your data in the
right place with the right access set up if the partitions should be
in different places, and so on.  Yes, that's true, but it's nothing to
be afraid of, just be aware of it and use a different scheme.

Read through past that one.  There are workarounds right in the
comments, like backup the disk to a file on another disk, then restore
that file to your new disk.

What I've done that works (so far) is first set up the new drive,
partition it, format it, and then use rsync to back up the partitions
from the old drive to the new one.

Mark