Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora

[Markus Kesaromous]

I am truly puzzled by these reports of success!!
I just finished cloning /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdc1
sdc1 is larger, so I did ntfsresize.
So far so good.

Thing is, sdc1 is a USB HD (with bios support).
Even though bios is configured to boot off of USB first, CD next and built-in HD last,
It still boots off of the built in drive. Only way I can force it to boot
off of USB HD is to get into bios and disable the built-in drive (set to not-installed)
and reboot - then bios will boot off of the USB drive.

However, windows still will not boot! It gives me a splash screen of windows logo,
then reboots.
Is there something in windows that insists that the drive be on same controller
as it was when first installed?

Markus

----------------------------------------
> Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:13:38 +0900
> From: debian at herakles.homelinux.org
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora
> 
> Oliver Ruebenacker wrote:
>>      Dear friends,
>> 
>>   I need to copy the hard disk of a Windows computer to a new hard
>> disk of equal size. I was thinking of connecting both drives
>> (SATA/150), booting from the Fedora 8 Rescue Disk and then do
>> 
>>   dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
>> 
>>   in hope that after that, the second hard disk can be used in place
>> of the first one (including booting Windows, of course).
>> 
>>   Does this work? Thanks!
> 
> It probably will work[1], but I would worry that the disks' gemoetries 
> may differ a little. Not all 120Gbyte drives have the same number of 
> cylinders.
> 
> I copy Windows immmoderately often. My preferred tool is a bootable CD 
> including ntfs-progs - think the latest Knoppix.
> 
> ntfsclone does an excellent job of copying a partition.
> If you need to change a partition's size, there's ntfsresize.
> 
> I'd probably copy (extremely carefully) the first sector with dd, then 
> use hdparm to make Linux reread the partition table on the target drive.
> 
> To be safe, I might resize the source partition(s) to a little smaller 
> using ntfsresize.
> 
> Then copy with ntfsclone, and resize again at the destination to make 
> sure the data fit snugly into the partition.
> 
> [1] I used dd to copy an 80 Gbyte drive to a 320 Gbyte drive. I'm happy 
> with the results, but then if it went wrong I know what to try next. It 
> would not work if the target drive was even one sector shorter. 
> Depending on partitioning.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Cheers
> John
> 
> -- spambait
> 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
> -- Advice
> http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
> 
> You cannot reply off-list:-)
> 
> -- 
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

_________________________________________________________________
Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get your "fix".
http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx