Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora

[jdow]

From: "Oliver Ruebenacker" <curoli at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, 2008, March 14 12:01


>     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!
> 
>     Take care

The drive does not even need to be the same size. I had a disk that
had developed read/write errors to several blocks which prevented
booting Windows. I got a larger disk and copied to that disk. It worked
and the rest of the disk became available, without even needing to
reregister XP SP2. With judicious use of "CONV=" parameters you can
get it to blow by the errors but fill the output blocks that are
blown by with zeros. That MAY (read will) result in lost data on a
chkdisk. But the disk should manage to come back if certain critical
parts are not damaged.

HINT: I tested with a Linux system with enough space on hard disk to
store the partition. Then I used mount to check if the partition would
mount. Once I got that working copying the partition to the new disk
was easy.

{^_^}