[Gllug] dd'ing a nearly empty disk to a SMALLER disk - is it possible?

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 06:28:59PM +0000, Malcolm Blackmore wrote:
> I need to transfer the contents of a nearly empty windows/linux
> partitioned 500gb disk to a 320gb disk mirroring the windows-root-home
> structure. There is less than 150gb actual content on this 500gb disk.
> This is to transfer the windows XP which there are no disks to reinstall
> the pre-installed XP that was on the original 40gb disk of the fujitsu -
> which was replaced with a larger disk. That was no problem, of course.
> But I bought 4x of these P4 computers for 50 quid the lot and now one of
> the disks in one of them has died and I have 3 spare 320gb sata disks to
> use.
> 
> Is this possible? How can I get the partitions and their contents,
> especially the XP which is vital to my 13 year old daughters SIMS
> playing(!) and a printer driver which is no longer available on the web
> for the linux root partitions.

This is not trivial.  The way to do it would start with a boot CD
which has gparted and ntfsresize on it.  ntfsresize can shrink the
data and gparted can move the partition tables accordingly.

Unfortunately the chance that you'll end up with a bootable Windows
machine is fairly low, since Windows doesn't appear to like having its
boot partition moved about (boot == C:\ for XP).  The chance that
you'll completely destroy the data by fat-fingering something or just
through not knowing the deep intricacies is quite high too.

I could also suggest P2V, but virtualization isn't good for playing 3D
games.

It's a bit unclear to me why you need to do this.  Is the 500GB disk
failing?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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