From: "John Summerfield" <debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 2008, March 14 17:13
Oliver Ruebenacker wrote:
Dear friends,
I need to copy the hard disk of a Windows computer to a new hard
disk of equal size. I was thinking of connecting both drives
(SATA/150), booting from the Fedora 8 Rescue Disk and then do
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
in hope that after that, the second hard disk can be used in place
of the first one (including booting Windows, of course).
Does this work? Thanks!
It probably will work[1], but I would worry that the disks' gemoetries
may differ a little. Not all 120Gbyte drives have the same number of
cylinders.
I copy Windows immmoderately often. My preferred tool is a bootable CD
including ntfs-progs - think the latest Knoppix.
ntfsclone does an excellent job of copying a partition.
If you need to change a partition's size, there's ntfsresize.
I'd probably copy (extremely carefully) the first sector with dd, then
use hdparm to make Linux reread the partition table on the target drive.
To be safe, I might resize the source partition(s) to a little smaller
using ntfsresize.
Then copy with ntfsclone, and resize again at the destination to make
sure the data fit snugly into the partition.
[1] I used dd to copy an 80 Gbyte drive to a 320 Gbyte drive. I'm happy
with the results, but then if it went wrong I know what to try next. It
would not work if the target drive was even one sector shorter.
Depending on partitioning.
Indeed, John. There is an important data block stored on the very last
block of each partition, a duplicate of the partition's boot block.
{^_-}
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