Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Patton Echols]

On 11/12/2010 09:00 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
> 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
>
>   

Thanks Basil. I'm going to read up on ntfsclone as Preston suggested.  
But do you mean that even if the comment is correct, and the geometries 
are different, dd would still produce a drive functionally the same?

I guess my concern is whether this statement:

> 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.

Means that windows will not boot.  The existing drive has windows on a 
single / first partition.