Re: Cloning a disk using dd

On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:09:00 -0700, Bill Waddington wrote:

On 1 Nov 2007 17:30:12 GMT, General Schvantzkoph
<schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

General, on further thought, you are making this too hard :) Just dd
the entire _XP_ drive, resize the cloned partition w/Gparted, (not
QTParted) pull the old, install the new and boot it up.

My guess is that XP will run, do its "configuring new devices" thing,
ask for a reboot, and run just fine.

My win forensic friend tells me that XP checks several things to see if
it has been copied to a new machine. Just a drive change shouldn't
trigger an activation request. If it does, decline and come back to
fight another day.

Bill


I'm not sure how Windows decided that the original drive was E: and the
cloned drive was C:. Before I did my second attempt at dd I formatted the
new drive on the old OS, it was then that the C letter was assigned. Is
it possible that they are just using a label in the partition table? If
not where is Windows equivalent of /etc/fstab?
.

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