Using a Linux Live CD to clone XP

[simstud]

Registered on this forum to say what a great tutorial, thanks a bundle. I used my linux desktop to upgrade the harddrive on my vista laptop by plugging the old and new sata drives into the desktop and following scheme B. Worked without a hitch, just requiring a reboot and partition resizing. Yay linux, and thanks again.

[saikee]

simstud,

Welcome to Justlinux!

[panterus]

what i need to do is transfer the internal hard drive to another internal hard drive on a laptop problem is i do not have usb external case for the old hard drive to be in or a expansion port transfer wire
so what i want to try is tranferring the data from the old drive to the external that i am currently running ubuntu on (also have a flash drive boot cd option if needed) as it has several large partitions in addition to the one ubuntu is on and then rebooting with the new hard drive in place and transfer once again to that drive

my question is simple do you see any potential issue doing it that way?

[panterus]

i tried it once and it caused the partition to become unknown type and unmountable i noticed after the first reboot that i hadnt made it bootable tried that and rebooted and it still showed as unknown so i reformatted it again to try once more but unsure if it is even possible

[panterus]

i noticed the option to repair file system in the disk utility do you think this could help my old hard drive?

[saikee]

You could transfer the whole hard disk as a file into an external hard disk and copy it back into a new hard disk which replaces the old laptop hard disk.

You should mount the external hard disk partition, which should be larger than the entire laptop hard disk you wish to clone, say on /mnt/sdb3 and call it my_old_hdd using a command like

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb3/my_old_hdd bs=32256

assuming your laptop hard disk is sda, external hard disk sdb, spare partition is sdb3 and you are booting it via a Linux in a USB CD.

You then power down, remove the old hard disk, install the new hard disk, boot up the Linux CD as before, check the sda is the source and the external hard disk is still the sdb and mount sdb3 as before. You can then dd it back by command like

sudo dd if=/mnt/sdb3/my_old_hdd of=/dev/sda bs=32256

You should see dd stops after the same number of records has been transferred in both cases.

[panterus]

should i run it off the live cd to do that then, currently ubuntu is running on the same external but in a different partition, it did copy the exact file numbers when i tried it before, but it didnt recognize the partition on the external after so this time will try using the folder technique

im guessing the way you have it typed out it just copies the contents of the folder to the new internal not the folder itself and that the folder is just to keep it tidy during the transfer

will try that if i dont hear back from you but would like to know if its different when running ubuntu on that same drive

[saikee]

I don't think it matters as long as the area of the hard disk you are using dd on has an operational Linux which may try to update the files during the dd operation.

The dd command actually copies the binary sector by sector and the file system is not involved at all, except as an output file first and then used in the second part as the input file. dd copies the boot sector as well.

Sorry for the late reply but I am currently holidaying between Australia and Hong Kong.

[Stanssongs]

if you hadnt noticed already all of your activation problems hardware etc etc can be solved by running sysprep before you try cloning the drive

I really enjoyed this thread, Thanks for posting! I love learning stuff like this even though I will have to refer back to this and read it all again if I ever start to actually do it (my brain is old lol).
Happy New year everyone.

[saikee]

Stanssongs,

Welcome to JustLinux !

We are all here to enjoy Linux because the OS's inner working is in the public domain and it is up to us to learn as much as we want.

[janetd]

I must thank you for the efforts you’ve put in writing this site.
I am hoping to see the same high-grade content from you in the future as well.
In fact, your creative writing abilities has inspired me to get my very own site now

[midtrans]

sysprep comes from microsoft, you can get it from their website or off a full install cd, its part of the distrib packages, you run sysprep on your "model" machine prior to ghosting/cloning it strips the drivers, configs etc etc and forces windows to act like it does when it is first installed on a machine, so it will hotplug to the new hardware if needed, plus you can use it to set new hostnames, and generate new SID's in case you are using a ms AD network