ghost harddrive from new HP Pavillion laptop

Hey gang, I'm looking for some advice.
My father, without consulting me, has run out and bought a new HP Pavillion DV6000 laptop. Not the machine I would have chosen, but anyway...
Of course, it has Vista on it. My father wants to give Vista a chance, but already we're noticing some slowness, especially after boot when the desktop is supposed to come up; it takes LONG. Anyway...
He's going to give it a try for a little while, he just bought it, and doesn't want to start tinkering with it too much just yet. I've already advised him that if at some point Vista starts to get to be too much for him, I can just put in linux for him(he's used Slackware before on a little desktop I had put together for him, and found it easy-peasy) as an alternative choice.
Naturally, when you buy a computer at a place like FutureShop nowadays, you never get any kind of Windows Install CD's. Apparantly, this particular laptop doesn't even need any kind of rescue CD's; nowadays its diskless. Imagine that.
So what do I want to do? Ghost the entire harddrive before doing any installing of Ubuntu, that's what! That way if we end up unhappy with the results, I can always ghost it back to the way it was. I'm thinking of using g4u for this. Any thoughts??

Yes.

First, don't blame FutureShop: HP now puts all the install images on a small (about 4-6GB) hidden partition on the HD. The HP 510 laptop I setup a while back had, as part of the firstboot proceedure, an initial backup to the DVD-RW drive (you're basically backing up the partition and setup software to two DVD-Rs). This saves them the cost of providing the DVDs, manuals, and packaging to the end user.

And, for the record, HP isn't the only one doing this.

Second, Ghost is terrific. However, to save time and energy, I'd just backup that "restore" partition using dd or BackupPC utils. Most use FAT-32 or NTFS, so it's easy to do.

Lastly, another option is to just slap a blank 2.5" HD in there, and let 'er rip. If he needs Vista, you can just throw the old one back in there (or just make it a dual-booter).

banzai "lap warmer" kai

Notebooks from HP (and more particularly the Pavilion series), usually feature an application called HP Recovery Manager. This will allow you to create a set of recovery disks specifically for your machine. You can then delete your partitions, and start from scratch.

* The data on the recovery disk set will be (bit-for-bit) identical to that on your recovery partition, so there's nothing to worry about! :)
You might also want to take a separate backup of the folder, swsetup, located within C:. It contains the drivers for the system, and other bundled utilities.

Here's an extract from HP's Help and Support Center:

Creating recovery disks using Recovery Manager.

The Recovery Manager examines your computer and determines how many blank CDs or DVDs the disk creation process will require. The disk creation process may require up to 10 or more CD-R disks or 1-3 DVD-R or DVD+R disks.

Caution: The disk must be either CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD+R. Do not use CD-RW or DVD-RW disks because the Read/Write type disks will cause the creation process to fail.

You can create a set of operating system recovery disks by following the steps below:

* Click on the Start button, and type Recovery in the search field.

* Select Recovery Manager, and when the wizard opens, click the Advanced options button, if available.

* Select Recovery Disk Creation, and follow the directions provided in the wizard.

After all the recovery disks are created, label the disks and store them in a safe place.

I will be very disappointed if I can do it with a Lnux Live CD to clone a laptop hard disk.

I am in Hong Kong for a holiday and have just bought a HP DV2000 laptop myself. I have no Linux access at this moment but have positioned myself for a cloning job by purchasing a brand new 2.5" 250Gb laptop hard disk already. The new latop has a 160Gb Sata disk running Vista. My plan is to upgrade the 160Gb disk to a 250Gb disk when I have a bit of time, using the procedure I wrote here. The new 2.5" 250Gb laptop hard disk was purchased with a external exclsoure that has both USB and eSata ports.

I have upgraded newly bought laptop hard disks every time before, usually within days I bought the laptops.

very easy to clone it in linux using a live cd
use the dd command to clone drive to another hardrive if you have an extra drive

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/usb/boot.mbr bs=512 count=1

that will get your master bootrecord you will want that because hp puts it on the hardrive so it knows how to boot the recovery drive. then do the dd command to clone drive

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/usb/drive.img

also clone the partion recory drive as well
then to restore it you just simple boot with the live cd and copy it all back to the drive

hope that helps.

i have a hp pavillion and im so pissed off that im going to demand a refund from best buy to swap it out. i had it sent back to factory due to the battey wont charge. they replaced batttery and then last night it once again died and wont recharge. all the problems i have with it using the ndiswrapper and broadcom bcm43xx which do work well as well as the ACPI problem with the machines i would stay away from hp laptops.

so i had to image my drives with dd command to save the linux partions so i coult then dd back my windows vista install because hp or bestbuy dont support linux ..

Thank you all for your replies. We don't have a spare harddrive to switch into the laptop, otherwise this would have been the best option. i845_, I'm going to investigate your suggestion of using 'Recovery Manager', because I want there to be a good backup of his laptop regardless. I'm still also researching the idea of using G4U, as I have an ftp server right here. It doesn't hurt to have multiple copies now does it?! Alternatively, do you guys think 'dd' would work over to an NFS drive? Probably eh?

I wrote in Post #4 that I was going to upgrade my newly brought laptop disk from 160Gb to 250Gb. Here are the steps I took while I was in a foreign country.

(1) Bought a HP Pavilion dv2000 Laptop - Intel Core Duo T7500 2.2GHz CPU, 2GB ram with 160Gb Sata hard disk. Only operating system is Windows Vista.

(2) Bought a 2.5" Hitachi Travelstar Sata 250Gb plus an external hard disk enclosure (has USB and eSata connections).

(3) Download Slax 6.0 from Internet in the hotel. Went out to buy some CD-RW and burn Slax into a bootable CD.

(4) Checked both hard disks connections were the same (optional)

(5) Booted up Slax 6.0 and checked hard disk partition by "fdisk -l". Original disk shon up as the device sda. Hooked up the 250Gb external hard disk via twin USB ports (only 2 for HP Pavilion). Checked the new disk shown up as the device sdb.

(6) Execute this command in root console

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32256

Slax recorded time taken 9275 sec (2.576 hours) @ 17.3Mb/s. 4961616 records transferred. 4961616x32256 = 160,041,885,696 bytes. That proved 160Gb have been transferred.

(7) Swapped the 160Gb disk with the 256Gb disk. Removed the external drive. Booted the newly cloned 250Gb hard disk and Vista booted as expected. Then Vista reported the new disk had been found and demanded an immediate reboot.

(8) After a reboot everything work normally and the extra hard disk space is reported as unallocated space. No re-activation needed. Everything was exactly as before excepth the hard disk is now bigger.

(9) Ran the Vista in the new 250Gb disk to write this post.

I don't suppose everyone is happy to open up a newly bought laptop to do thing thngs I did but losing a Vista license and/or a 160Gb hard disk are possibly the worst that could happen.

Technically that is all that takes - One line of dd command by any Linux to migrate any hard disk to another. I have never run into any problem before and am confident to do it with a new machine purchased within 48 hours while I was travelling in a foreign country.

Looks like my chances to tinker with the laptop are gone; he's chosen to return the thing and go with a Macbook instead. Waiting around for Vista just wasn't an option for him.:D

This is going to be a good domonstration of my trust in Linux.

I am answering this post in a foreighn country after purchasing a laptop and then cloning its Vista with a Linux downloaded from the Internet.

My Vista was originally in an internal 2.5" 160Gb Disk A.

I bought a new 2.5" laptop disk and cloned it into a 260Gb Disk B (a Hitchi Travel Star) hooked up as an external USB disk, as described in my last post.

I then purchased a new 500Gb 3.5" external hard disk C (a Samsung for desktop) and also another 2.5" external laptop disk D (Samsung) because of the following reasons

(a) Both external 2.5" and 3.5" external hard disks were purchased seaprateIy with disks and external enclosures. Both external enclosures support eSata (in addition to USB ports).

(b) I discovered my new laptop has an Express card slot and not an ordinary PCMICA (card bus). I could get an Express card that can provide two eSata connections. Therefore I could run the two external hard disks as eSata instead of USB devices and get a faster response.

(c) A colleague of mine knew I was going to Hong Kong and had asked me to bring him back a nice external hard disk and so I am buying hard disks on his behalf.

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I thought I may as well try to clone Vista into all Disk C & D (3.5" and 2.5" disks) having successfully done it from Disk A to B (both 2.5" laptop disks) and try to see if Vista can boot from an eSata.

So I first cloned the Vista from the external 2.5" Disk A (the original 160Gb shipped with the laptop since removed and replaced by Disk B) to an external 3.5" 500Gb desktop Disk C using Slax.

I then used the 3.5" 500Gb desktop Disk C as the source to clone its image into the enternal 2.5" 250Gb laptop Disk D.

I now have back-up my Vista in all four hard disks A, B, C & D. I used just one line of dd command in all cases running Slax as the Live CD.

I then removed the internal hard disk B and tried to boot the laptop off just with the external 3.5" Disk C using eSata connection. It failed. So did the disk D.

This is not exactly an disappointment because my eSata connection is via an Express card (an notched PCMICA card) and I would be surprised if Vista can be booted off a PCMCIA device. Nevertheless it was an useful confirmation to my belief.

However when I installed the Disk D into the laptop as an internal disk it boots successfully. That I think is a smal achievement because the image was transferred twice; first from an external 2.5" 160Gb disk A into an external 3.5" 500Gb disk C and then secondly to an external 2.5" 250Gb disk D. It was technically impossible for me to verify if the image in the 3.5" hard disk C was successfully or not.

There is no technical difficulty of transferring an operating system from 2.5" disk to an 3.5" disk nor from a small 160Gb disk to a large 500Gb disk but cloning from a 500Gb hard disk into a 250Gb disk is in unknown territory.

I have reason to believe it would work out because my image was only 160Gb large. When dd was asked to clone the 500Gb disk C into a 250Gb disk D it stopped when the target was exhausted. The cloning was technically incomplete but it worked because the partition table covers only the first 160Gb space. Between 160Gb to 500Gb the space was just unallocated space which dd would faithfully copy regardless. It was forced to stop at 250Gb position because Disk D had no more space to copy to. By then the first 160Gb was was healthy because the partition table did not use the hard disk space beyond the first 160Gb.

I don't think I have pulled off a stunt here but just using what dd is supposed to do.

I enclosed the history of the cloning operation below

Cloning from the original 2.5" 160Gb Disk A as external eSata to a new 3.5" 500Gb Disk C. The device sda is Disk B which has Linux installed, device sdb is the Disk A and device sdc is Disk C. Disk C had a partition because the first attempt was aborted after the laptop battery ran out. The following was the second attempt.

Code:

root@slax:~# fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 19458 30401 87907680 5 Extended /dev/sda5 19458 19579 979933+ 82 Linux swap /dev/sda6 19580 20795 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda7 20796 22011 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 22012 23227 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda9 23228 24443 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda10 24444 25659 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda11 25660 30401 38090083+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdc2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdc3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS root@slax:~# dd if=/dev/sdb /dev/sdc bs=32256 dd: unrecognized operand `/dev/sdc' Try `dd --help' for more information. root@slax:~# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=32256 4961616+0 records in 4961616+0 records out 160041885696 bytes (160 GB) copied, 5576.47 s, 28.7 MB/s root@slax:~#

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Cloning from the new 3.5" 500Gb Disk C to the new 2.5" 250Gb Disk D. The device sda is Disk B, device sdb is the Disk D and device sdc is Disk C. Disk D or device sdb had no partition and was submitted as a raw disk.

Code:

root@slax:~# fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 19458 30401 87907680 5 Extended /dev/sda5 19458 19579 979933+ 82 Linux swap /dev/sda6 19580 20795 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda7 20796 22011 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 22012 23227 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda9 23228 24443 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda10 24444 25659 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda11 25660 30401 38090083+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdc2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdc3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS root@slax:~# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdb bs=32256 dd: writing `/dev/sdb': No space left on device 7752337+0 records in 7752336+0 records out 250059350016 bytes (250 GB) copied, 12513.7 s, 20.0 MB/s root@slax:~#

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Finally when there were only two 2.5" laptop disks left. Device sda is Disk B with Linux and Device sdb is Disk D with only 160Gb filled and cloned from the original disk.

Code:

root@slax:~# fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda4 19458 30401 87907680 5 Extended /dev/sda5 19458 19579 979933+ 82 Linux swap /dev/sda6 19580 20795 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda7 20796 22011 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 22012 23227 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda9 23228 24443 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda10 24444 25659 9767488+ 83 Linux /dev/sda11 25660 30401 38090083+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 9810 78795534 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb2 9810 18459 69475328 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb3 18460 19457 8016435 7 HPFS/NTFS root@slax:~#

The cloning speed between an internal Sata and an external Sata as a USB device previously reported was 17.3Mb/s.

The 2.5" Sata disks run at 5400rpm and the 3.5" Sata operates at 7200rpm so as eSata disks in both I got cloning speed 28.7Mb/s.

When both eSata were 2.5" disks running at 5400rpm the cloning rate dropped back to 20Mb/s.

Um, do you think you could bring me back a 500GB external hard-drive???:p

Those are quite the interesting experiments you conduct there Saikee. Just when I thought you were the GRUB master, you come along and hit me in the head with this dd thing. Bravo.