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Hi Saikee.
Fantastic information, friend. Its well appreciated that you go the extra, clear step in explaining the processes. It can be daunting to one-time cloners like myself.
I have a question, i hope you or anyone here can help, as i will be cloning my HD as soon as possible.
My laptop HD died recently and i had a new one installed under warranty. At first, great. Only, i use the computer [toshiba laptop] for audio purposes, and the repair shop installed a 4,200rpm drive [SATA / 2.5" 200g], whereas the old [dead] one was a 5,200rpm [SATA / 2.5" 200g]. Thats now unacceptable speed and performance wise so i've decided to buy a W.D. 7,200rpm [SATA / 2.5" 200g+] drive and Migrate/Clone my VISTA OS and all files.
But Toshiba's have a 'HIDDEN VISTA INSTALL PARTITION' on their factory drives, as the units dont come shipped with a Vista DVD.
Will the Linux LiveCD DD function recognise this hidden partition? I'm assuming so thus far, as you have stated that the process is simply cloning '1's and '0's, but need to be sure.
Alongside this, I am planning to do the transfer within my SATA Desktop PC. The reason for this is my laptop can currently only support a single drive. I will be unplugging ALL of my desktops SATA drives and plugging in my existing VISTA 2.5" drive and the to-be-cloned 2.5" drive, then booting into Linux. After the clone i will shut down the desktop, install the newly cloned drive into the laptop and hope i dont have to re-certify vista.
This seem like a perfect plan?
Also, do you still reccomend either of the two bootable LiveCD's from the first post in this thread as the best ones for uneducated Linux users? and does anyone have a link?
Thanks in advance peoples!
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drooid,
Welcome to Justlinux!
I believe the hidden Vista partition will work in the clone.
In your case, you are cloning different makes of hard disks I strongly advise you to check and ensure the new target disk is at lease as large as the existing source disk. This means the new disk must have the number of sectors at least the same or more than the source disk, otherwise your new disk will not work because the partition table will indicate a bigger number sectors than actually available. No operating system would touch such disk as no one would know what to do with it while guaranteeing the data security at the same time.
Using a desktop to do the cloning, while removing all the existing hard disks, is a smart move especially if you are not comfortable with the device names from the Linux side. I have used 3.5" to 2.5" adaptor to carry out such cloning before but that was for Pata disks. I am not aware the same kind of adaptor is sold for Sata disks though.
What I have discovered recently is the use of eSata on a laptop. One can buy such adaptor in the PCMCIA slot or the newer narrorwer card bus slot. There are 2.5" hard disk enclosures sold with both USB and eSata connectors. The eSata is about 2 to 3 times faster than USB connection and well worth having. It allows a faster transfer on your 2.5" disk whenever it is used externelly. This way you don't have to use a desktop PC at all.
I have done this myself recently cloning a new HP laptop, changing its 150Gb hard disk to 250Gb disk within 24 hours after the purchase while on a holiday.
If you clone Vista, which has its own resizer facility internally, then any Linux Live CD will provide you with the Bash command dd. While on holiday I just download Slax, burn it into a CD and use it to do the cloning.
Lastly I strongly recommend check the disk geometry by the Linux terminal command
IN it you should know exactly the device names of every partition and hard disk. As long as you make sure the output file (the "of=/dev/sdx" in the dd command) is correctly pointed to your target disk you should have a successful migration.
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Thanks for the quick reply.
Okay, so today i'm aiming at a 250gig WD drive if i can find one thats 7200rpm. that'll give me 50 gig extra room, and a truckload of faster data i/o ![Smilie](images/smilies/smile.gif)
I'm happy to do the transfer on my desktop, and by pulling out my other drives, nothing can go wrong with the precious data. But i'll definately look into eSata.
Thanks so much, Will be doing the process today or tomorrow and I'll be sure to update the result, for other NooB's!
[edit first post, i meant to say 5,400rpm, not 5,200rpm :S]
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magic linux live cd
Hi saikee, thanks for the great threads, it's exactly what I have been looking for, for some hours now.
I would like to try the imaging with two systems and have some questions.
I am just dreaming about a magic Linux Live CD that someone might know. ![Smilie](images/smilies/smile.gif)
I wished:
--> it could boot up a live system in a small 56 MB Ram (the smallest of my systems)
--> has ndiswrapper ready
--> can mount a ntfs harddisk (ntfs-3g?)
My ultimate wish is to use your procedure to image systems via external usb harddisk or wifi usb stick, to a file, and then restore the systems.
Is there something like that or is that a dream of a foolish linux-noob.
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yuppih!
Last edited by slafochmed; 06-07-2008 at 06:25 PM.
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I want to move the entire current system to a new hard disk because I get
--------------------- Smartd Begin ------------------------
Currently unreadable (pending) sectors detected:
/dev/hda - 28 Time(s)
3 unreadable sectors detected
for months.
The question is: can I do dd for the above slightly damaged disk without getting error abort? If the answer is no, then what could be the best method of the move?
Thanks in advance.
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hiwa,
You can try dd with the "noerror" option.
It is defined in "man dd" as
Code:
noerror
continue after read errors
Failing that you can also try to download "ddrescue" which has good reports on salvaging bad disks but I haven't had a disk bad enough (and without backup) to use it yet.
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Thanks saikee.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=32256 conv=noerror
did work perfect. It took thirty-three minutes for 40 GB hda disk to dump. It was such a piece of cake that it felt anticlimax...
side effect:
Old Maxtor 40 GB ... Noisy and slow
New Seagate 160 GB ... Silent and fast
Thanks again. Yours is a very good article.
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Glad to hear you got it sorted.
Thanks for confirming that the procedure is easy as I have claimed.
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A funny aftermath
We see on the brand-new disk:
--------------------- Smartd Begin ------------------------
Currently unreadable (pending) sectors detected:
/dev/hda - 12 Time(s)
3 unreadable sectors detected
It has 'inherited' the info for the bad sectors from the old disk! Could we fix this without reformatting?
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A successful cloning of a hard disk is you get exactly a mirror image of the original.
The bad sectors in the original can be physically corrupted areas. They cannot be read and so cannot be written on the new disk. Thus the physical damage is not transferred. All you have is the partition has a few minor holes in some of the files.
The easiest is to delete the damaged files. No need to reformat the disk unless the OS depends on the damaged files. In such a case your system should not boot.
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> The easiest is to delete the damaged files
The problem is how to find them.
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trouble with an XP clone
Hi all. I am trying to clone an XP install following the instructions here. I'm booting using a recent parted magic live CD.
I must be missing something. I keep getting "missing operating system".
I have XP on a 20 gig drive. I'm trying to use DD to clone XP to a 40 gig drive (entire drive).
BIOS picks up the drives fine. fdisk, cfdisk, parted all ID the drives.
I'm using:
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32256
40 gig is using cable select, 20 gig disconnected when I try to boot. Every time, I see "missing operating system". I tried using fixmbr from the xp sp2 cd with no luck.
Any suggestions?
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sawsedge,
Your error message is consistent with the Bios failed to find an operating system in your hard disk.
When you use the Parted Magic CD, click the terminal mode and post here the output from the command
On completion of the cloning there should be a message of how many record in and out.
Since you are cloning 20Gb and each record is 32256 byte long so you should see about 620039 records in and out reported. Did you get that report? The in and out records are the number of times the hard disks being read and written. The disk is correctly cloned if the number of records in is equal to the number of record out.
Remember there is nothing shown in the cloning process except the flickering of the hard disk LED. Allow 30-40Mb/s transfer rate for both internal disks. If one or two of them are USB hard disks the transfer rate can drop below 10Mb/s and so it needs about an hour time to clone an internal 20Gb disk into a USB external hard drive.
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What you describe for the dd command is about what I saw. I don't recall the exact number of records... the dd command took about 20 minutes or so.
Here is the info: (40 gig not attached at the moment, kind of harried right now, will have to do it later)
root@PartedMagic:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 20.4 GB, 20490559488 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 39703 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x384372b4
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 39702 20009776+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000a1dc7
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 1 8001 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 2 523 4192965 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3 524 5622 40957717+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 5623 60801 443225317+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 5623 60801 443225286 b W95 FAT32
root@PartedMagic:~#
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