Re: cloning a Windows drive

["Stephen Adler" <user=65@nabble.blu.org>]

 Hmmm... this is going to be very interesting. I'm doing this all within 
the context of a virtual machine... VMWare actually. Will doing a copy 
of c: to d: at the drag and drop level work as well? 

Thanks. 

Tom Metro wrote: 
> 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 
>