Just a report of cloning XP for a laptop.
Daughter needed to switch from an old 40Gb (85% full) to a new 80Gb hard drive. She did not know how to separate the data from the system and everything was mingled up.
Using Kanotix on a AMD64 3000 MSI mobo PC and The cloning took 1:04 hours, returning 10.6Mb/s trandfer rate. Source disk hooked as an external USB2 disk and the target was put inside a caddy running as internal disk. I had Kanotix installed in a 5Gb partition in the hard disk to perform this task.
A CD would have been totally adequate but installing it is a 15 minutes job because Kanotix comes with QtParted handy for resizing the partition for its own installation.
For the hell of it I then tried Ghost (2003 version) so as to see the difference. Got hold of another 80Gb 2.5" disk formatted with the first partition matching the source Xp. Ghost failed twice due to a variety of read and write errors. The maximum it reached was 4% and its scheduled time to completion then was 1:15 hours.
I went back to Kantotix with the second disk but the cloning was unsuccessfull when I had both source and target disks running as internal hard drives (in caddies). The Toshiba source has no detail on how to configure master and slave. The target Hitachi disk booted but there were a lot of mis-linked files. I therefore had to repeat the exercise.
I then used a media reader box, not knowing if it was a USB1 or USB2, to host the 80Gb Hitachi unit, which consumes 1 amp, as media reader has its own power supply and battery. The source disk was ran as an internal hard drive in a caddy. The time taken was 3:04 hours for the 40Gb transfer. The first 80Gb unit Fujitsu consumed only 0.55 Amp and could run off a double-head USB port without external power supply.
Both units cloned by Linux were successfully. The commercial software in this case failed. Had it not it would be still slower than the Linux method.
dkeav,
Where does the "sysprep" come from? Is it from MS or a program one needs to build into the distro?