Re: Cloning a disk using dd

On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 08:27:28 -0600, Douglas Mayne wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:44:41 -0500, General Schvantzkopf wrote:

I'm trying to clone a Win2K disk using Fedora Live on a USB FLASH disk.
I did a

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

It seems to have cloned the MBR correctly and the partition layout
looks correct when I look at it using GParted. However when I tried to
the boot the cloned 2K disk it started to boot and then failed with an
inaccessible boot disk error. When I booted the original 2K disk and
tried to look at the cloned disk it said that the disk wasn't
formatted. So it appears that the NTFS file system wasn't cloned
correctly.

The source disk is an old 40G that I had laying around, the destination
disk is a new 500G. After the dd there was a 40G partition on the 500G
disk and dd reported that it copied the right number of bytes.

Is there a switch to dd that I need to add to the command? Does anyone
have any idea about what went wrong?

The partition table uses (cylinders, heads, sectors). If the two drives
have a different number of (heads,sectors), then I don't think strict
"dd" will work. The drives have to be almost identical to work,
especially with Windows in the mix. However, if the OS is only
GNU/Linux, then it might work because LBA disk mode is always used- even
by the loader.

I think the dd worked fine, as long as I have the old drive in the system
I can boot the cloned partition. The problem is that Windoze is looking
for something on the E: partition (where the original Win2K install was
done) but the cloned partition is C:. In Linux I would just edit /etc/
fstab and I'd be done but I don't know how to do an equivalent thing in
Windows. You can change drive letter in Windows but you can't do it to
the root partition and the problem seems to be that I need to change the
new drives to be the same as the old drive's number.

I should explain why I'm going though this pain. My girlfriend uses XP
and no amount of pleading is going to get her to change. I'm planning on
replacing an old 80G drive in her system with a new 500G, I also want to
come up with a reasonably procedure for backing up her environment. What
would be a pimple removal in Linux is a heart lung transplant in Windows.
In Linux you would just do a clean install of the OS, which is a 20
minute operation, and copy the other partitions. If you have a distro
sensitivity you can run a VM on top of the host OS and you are done, I do
that all the time running CentOS VMs on top of Fedora. A backup in Linux
is just an rsync of your important data and binary applications to
another system. In Windows none of this is possible because the
applications and the OS are entangled plus they all have licensing
issues. Instead of backing up a few gigabytes you need to backup
everything because you can't disentangle the OS + Apps + Data. I tried
doing a VMware snapshot of here system so that she could run it as a VM
(which can be easily copied to another disk or system) but that ran into
the Windows Activation problem. When I booted the VM it demanded to be
activated which I couldn't do without risking deactivating the host OS on
her system. I can't do a clean install of the OS either because she
claims that it took her months to get the system into the state that she
likes and because she would have to reactivate both XP and some of her
apps like Photoshop (she had to call Adobe when she moved over to this
box in the spring).

The bottom line is that I need a procedure for moving and backing up an
XP environment. I'm trying to do this with tools I understand, which
means Linux tools, but I've had to learn more about Windows then I ever
wanted to know. Does anyone have any suggestions for accomplinsing this
task?

p.s. The reason that I've been using 2K and not XP for my experiments is
that 2K doesn't use Activation, it uses the old serial number method. I'm
doing this on my sandbox machine so I can start from scratch if someone
has a straight forward procedure for doing this.
.

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