Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Mark <mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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I would recommend ntfsclone over dd.  It will only copy the blocks
with data in them, instead of every block, making it much faster.  I
also seem to have better general success with it.  With it, you should
be able to copy to a disk of the same size or larger.  I would start
by making the partitions the exact same, copying everything and making
sure it boots okay, then using any of the dozens of good, free
partitioning software out there to expand the NTFS partition to fill
the rest of the drive.

Here are two pretty good guides on using ntfsclone:

http://edoceo.com/exemplar/ntfsclone-transfer-windows

http://bahut.alma.ch/2005/04/cloning-xp-with-linux-and-ntfsclone_23.html

Preston