Re: cloning a Windows drive

["Tom Metro-12" <user=71@nabble.blu.org>]

 Stephen Adler wrote: 
> What's the windows equivalent of doing a 
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb 
> in windows vista? 

Ummm...it's an easy two step process: 

1. Boot a Linux live CD, 
2. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb 

Seriously, that's what I've been doing for years. As far as I know, if 
you really want a device-level clone of a drive, you need to use third 
party software. 

(Actually, if we're talking an NTFS file system, using ntfsclone will be 
a lot faster than dd, but it still requires booting a Linux CD.) 


> My c: drive is too small an I want to add a larger d: 
> drive, copy all off what's on c: to d: and make d: bootable, then swap 
> the disks. 

D: will be made bootable as a side effect of the cloning process. I 
don't recall if ntfsclone will pull over the boot sector, but dd 
definitely will. If not you can always use a quick dd command to just 
copy the boot sector or use a Windows installation CD to partition and 
format the new disk. 

Your steps also skip over resizing the partition. If you're going to 
clone the drive to accomplish the data transfer, then your new big drive 
will contain a partition sized for the old drive. ntfsresize can resize 
the partition to use up the available space on the new drive. 

Check the list archives for recommended live CDs that contain the ntfs 
tools and GUI partition editors. 

  -Tom 

-- 
Tom Metro 
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA 
"Enterprise solutions through open source." 
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and 
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is 
believed to be clean. 

_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss