[ale] OT: Copying a complete hard drive

[Nathan J. Underwood]

You could also use partimg, but you may need a 3rd machine as a storage 
area for the resulting image.

Boot to Knoppix on the desktop with the XP install.  Start partimg, and 
'image' that drive to a file (don't recall if there's an option to image 
to another drive, but if there is, I've not tried it).  Once that's 
complete, boot to Knoppix on the laptop, and choose the reverse (image 
the hard drive from the image file).  We're currently experimenting with 
this at work and it works pretty good.  We used to use Ghost (at a 
former employer), but there's no funding for it here.  Partimg seems 
slower, but it seems to work, and it's free.  Plus, if you have nic's 
that can boot to the LAN, a Knoppix terminal server will remove the need 
to tote the Knoppix CD around with you (just boot to the network on the 
target machine(s)).

--
registered linux user # 73046

Nathan J. Underwood
Cyber Tech Cafe' <><
http://www.cybertechcafe.net

Jonathan Glass wrote:
> 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