[Wylug-help] Disk cloning

[James Holden]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 03:59:31PM +0100, David Noble wrote:
> Help again please,
>                             My 75yr. old sister has a 500Mhz PC with a 
> 4Gb hd which is almost full.
> I have a 40Gb hd and an external USB drive caddy for it and would like 
> to clone her existing O$
> to the big drive.  ( OK I know it's a Windows job but  I have got her 
> using Thunderbird ! and
> hope to demonstrate the powers of Linux )  I use Mepis and have the 
> Mepis Live disc also
> Knoppix and Mandrake Move.  Presumeably the USB disc will be mounted as 
> sda .
>                           I've briefly Googled and seen reference to 
> doing this from the command
> line with dd but am not sure how exactly to use this.  Is there a 
> program to do what I want?
>                          I intend partioning the bigger drive with 
> Gparted into 2  sections and use
> the second one later for a linux installation.  Should the first 
> partition for the clone be formatted
> first with FAT32 or left empty ?
>                                                   TIA   David

Hi David,

dd isn't what you want for doing this.

You *can* clone hard disks with dd, but they need to be identical disks,
so it's only really useful if you're setting up several brand-new,
identical machines.

I've never done this using Linux tools before. The last time I did
anything like this I used Norton Ghost, which worked very well.

Are you intending to put the 40GB drive inside the PC, or are you
intending to boot from it in it's USB enclosure? If it's the latter, I
don't think you'll have much luck with a machine that old. I'm not even
sure that Windows can cope with being on an external drive at all.

If you're planning on putting the drive into the PC on a 'proper' IDE
interface, you might also encounter issues with a 40GB drive on hardware
as old as that. I recall some BIOS limitations around that era.

In short - dd isn't going to do what you want. Norton Ghost will (or did
last time I looked) but it's not free and probably doesn't work with USB
drives. You might be able to put the 40gb drive on the secondary IDE
interface though.


Regards,

James


> 
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