[ale] OT: Copying a complete hard drive

Calvin Harrigan charriglists at bellsouth.net
Tue Oct 19 13:13:40 EDT 2004


John Wells wrote:

>Nathan J. Underwood said:
>  
>
>>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)).
>>    
>>
>
>Nathan,
>
>Awesome.  Thanks for the link.  Just what I was looking for (don't really
>have the budget for Ghost either :)).
>
>Can you "image" the file across to and from the network, out of curiosity?
> I have a 120GB drive in the machine I'll be imaging, so I can easily save
>the image there.  But to get it over to the laptop drive, I'll have to
>either remove the laptop harddrive and drop it in the desktop with an
>adapter, or restore it from the network.
>
>I'll take a look at the partimage documentation as well.  Thanks again for
>the link.
>
>John
>
>
>
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>  
>
I've been reading through this thread and then it occurred to me, are 
you planning on running that XP installation on the laptop?  Even when 
you get the install transferred, will XP work?  Isn't XP tied to several 
pieces of hardware serial numbers?  If you change those pieces doesn't 
it crap out or at the very least force you to re-register or something?  
Just something to think about/verify.

Calvin



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