[Gllug] copying a hard drive.

[john gennard]

I bought a secondhand T20 laptop before Christmas and
with the help of this list have had it working very
well since.

When I got the machine, it had XP Pro and the Pro
office suite installed. I wanted to keep these, as I
have an overseas correspondent with whom I was swapping
a lot of data, and she uses Excel which I could then
use without the hassle of converting her files. Of
course, I have no CDs for the expensive Win software.

The machine hard drive is only 12Gig, but I managed to
repartition it and install Debian Sarge which is what
I normally use. Grub is used as the bootloader.

As the result of a recent thread on the Debian User List,
I've decided I'd like to try to copy my Laptop hard drive
onto a small external drive which would (hopefully!) give
me a complete backup. Then, I could get a larger drive for
the laptop and take everything back onto it - putting
anything over 12Gig (or for safety 13Gig) into Debian,
and retain Mr G's 'stuff' to put onto another box if the
laptop goes 'belly-up'.

My immediate problem is how to do this.

a. Should I use an external IDE drive on the Laptop, and
	if so how can I do this (what interface etc)?. OR,

b. Could I put the IDE drive in one of my three normal
	boxes and try to copy to it from the laptop
	after adding it to my small home network, using
	say Knoppix and dd?. I'm not very experienced, but
	it seems to me that this ought to work.

c. Am I correct in accepting that I can get a complete and
	bootable copy of my laptop hard drive provided the
	partition on the drive I want to use is greater in
	size than 12Gig? Or are there any 'catches' I've
	not seen so far?

Can someone kindly help, or just put me in my place if this
idea is merely a pipe dream.

Cheers,						John.





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