Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Patton Echols]

On 11/12/2010 08:39 PM, Preston Hagar wrote:
> 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. 

Yes, it was a comment, but the author agreed with it leaving the 
question below

>>  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.
>>     

The question is if the new disk will then boot XP without having to to 
surgery.  That's the goal.
>> 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.
>>     

That would copy all the files, but would the partition be bootable just 
like the old one?  I find it hard to believe that cloning windows is 
that easy.


>> 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.
>   

Thanks Preston, I'll give those a read.

> 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
>
>