[ale] OT: Copying a complete hard drive

Jonathan Glass jonathan.glass at ibb.gatech.edu
Tue Oct 19 06:50:41 EDT 2004


Quoting John Wells <lists at sourceillustrated.com>:

> Guys,
> 
> I have a desktop with a Windows XP hard drive and would like to transfer
> the entire drive to a laptop.  The laptop has a 40GB hard drive, and the
> XP machine has a 20GB hard drive.  I can safely overwrite all data on the
> laptop drive.
> 
> With as little ridicule as you can manage (hey...it's for work), is there
> any easy or creative way to accomplish this with open tools?  If not, any
> way to do it with commercial tools?
> 
> Thanks for the help!
> 
> John

Buy $10.00 laptop->ide converter.
Install both drives in one machine.
Boot off Knoppix CD.
<wonder if you need to create a partition on the bigger drive?>
dd if=/dev/laptop/harddrive of=/dev/40/gb/ide/harddrive

I won't promise it will be fast, but it should get the contents, the MBR and
file permissions.  I would use ghost and image them from disk to disk, and
expand the destination partition to the full 40GB of space.

Thanks & HTH
-- 
Jonathan Glass

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