Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora

jdow jdow at earthlink.net
Mon Mar 17 20:06:02 UTC 2008


Markus, since you are so insistent I will be triply redundant -

You absolutely MUST copy block zero, at the very least, as well as the
partition you want copied. It is best to copy the entire disk. Copying
only one partition is not necessarily workable for a boot partition.
It MAY work for a data only partition; but, I have seen indications of
failures in this regard.

{^_^}
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Markus Kesaromous" <remotestar at live.com>
Sent: Friday, 2008, March 14 21:14


>
> I am truly puzzled by these reports of success!!
> I just finished cloning /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdc1
> sdc1 is larger, so I did ntfsresize.
> So far so good.
>
> Thing is, sdc1 is a USB HD (with bios support).
> Even though bios is configured to boot off of USB first, CD next and 
> built-in HD last,
> It still boots off of the built in drive. Only way I can force it to boot
> off of USB HD is to get into bios and disable the built-in drive (set to 
> not-installed)
> and reboot - then bios will boot off of the USB drive.
>
> However, windows still will not boot! It gives me a splash screen of 
> windows logo,
> then reboots.
> Is there something in windows that insists that the drive be on same 
> controller
> as it was when first installed?
>
> Markus
>
> ----------------------------------------
>> Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:13:38 +0900
>> From: debian at herakles.homelinux.org
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> Cheers
>> John
>>
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