Cloning hard drive with dd or other?

[Kai Presler-Marshall]

Clonezilla.  It's a live CD, free, and will flawlessly clone a partition or
disk.

I've used it many times with success for cloning entire drives and
individual partitions.  It's text-only, but most of you guys are probably OK
with that ;)

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Patton Echols <p.echols at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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