On 4/14/2013 6:14 PM, Dave C wrote:
> I have about filled up my 75 gb HDD and rather than put in a new, bigger
> HDD and then manually install everything, I would like to clone a
> bootable image from the existing HDD over to the new HDD. Anyone got any
> experience in doing this? Advice?
I've done it a bunch, but I'm a pro, and my usuall method isn't for the
faint of heart; and some unix / linux experience helps, too.
* Get a linux "live CD" image and burn it onto a disk. I like "Puppy
Linux" (google will turn up any of this stuff, so I'll leave that to
you.) A live CD is a full operating system that boots and runs from
memory only. You don't have to install it, or modify anything on the HDD.
* Install new drive. Real easy with SATA, which is a given on anything
built in the last 8 years or so.
* Boot Puppy Linux. It'll look a lot like a familiar Windows desktop.
* Its system utilities menu has a program "gparted". This is a disk
partition editor, much like partition magic if you ever used that back
in the day.
* Create the partition layout you want, and make the first one active or
bootable using the "flags" menu option.
* The old and new drives show up on the desktop with unix device names,
like sda0 and sdb0. Take note of them. You can click to open them and
verify which drive is the old C:. You'll have to right-click and do a
"dismount" to close them.
* Open "terminal" or "command line" or whatever it's called.
* You've gonna use a command line program "ntfsclone" to copy from the
old to the new drive. It takes all the sectors in use and builds them
into a data stream that you can store somewhere, or shoot to a 2nd copy
and extract.
* Command will be like:
ntfsclone -s /dev/sda1 -o - | ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sdb1 -
BE real careful here; unix tends to give ya' enough rope to hang
yourself. make sure those /dev entries are referring to the correct
disk, or it will be happy to do exactly what you tell it, and copy the
empty drive to the good one!
That's it. It's not really as hairy as it sounds. Google ntfsclone, and
there are a bunch of other similar how-tos out there. I would NOT use
the xfer programs that the drive makers offer. The ones I've looked at
usually are just a batch file using "xcopy" or something, which does NOT
produce a true image or clone of your drive.
-Wayne
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