Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Basil Chupin]

On 11/13/2010 03:05 PM, Mark 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.

[pruned]

Absolutely. I think that the only real concern one would have is to 
ensure that the new HD is AT LEAST as big as the original - it cannot be 
smaller, that is :-) .

BC

-- 
A man kept complaining about not having shoes to wear - until he saw a man with no legs.