RE: Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora


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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora

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.



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Cheers
John

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