Clone a hard drive with Windows XP OS on it?

Hi,

Is it possible to use Knoppix to clone a hard drive with Windows XP OS on it, to another hard drive? This would be in the case owhen someone wants to upgrade to a faster and bigger hard drive.

Any ideas?

neilsanner

partimage and dd are two candidates, so are regular copy and fixboot, fixmbr from the recoveryconsole...

Will it do the same as Norton Ghost for example?

What does Norton Ghost do?

:?

I mean, after the clone process, will the new drive boot windows normally like the original hard drive?

Any utility that makes a bit image copy of a complete drive will result in a cloned copy. It is important that the boot sector be included in both the source and target if you have no other way to update it. This will of course result in a target drive with exactly the same partition information as the source. Further manipulation will be required to adjust partition and filesystem size. There are literally dozens of tools available, both free and not, for the operations that you are about to perform. I have heard both good and bad concerning Ghost and NTFS. Personally, I wouldn't touch a NTFS with someone elses 10 foot pole. As good as the current crop of FLOSS tools for NTFS are, all it takes is one little change pushed out by microsoft service pack to make them obsolete. This of course depends on the fact that someone at microsoft actually knows NTFS well enough to effect a transparent change.

I suggest you read up on the tools available to you, determine a list of necessary procedures and _practice_ with unimportant information first. Even the skilled make a backup copy of any critical data before partition/filesystem manipulation.

The cloning with dd is straight forward. Afterwards you need to change the SID of the computer if you are going to have clones on the same network. There is a free utility from sysinternals to do that. Ghost uses ghostwalker and there is something similar for drive image. They are purchased software. The gadget from sysinternals is freeware and changes the SID for you

Thank you everyone about dd and partimage.

Thanks a lot rcook about the SID walker, this is very valuable information!!

Humm... It took all the afternoon and a part of the night to clone a 60GB ATA hard drive with dd... It seems to me that Norton Ghost is a lot faster than that (1-2 hours)... Is it possible that it's because dd is a bit image copier? Is there a faster utility in Knoppix for cloning harddrives?

parted, partimage, g4l, QTparted ...

Ghost for Linux (g4l), hey? That sounds good. I'll give it a try next time I need to clone a drive.

Thanks!

When you use DD or partimage to clone (or backup and restore) an XP hard drive or partition, will you have any issues because you are writing to an XP NTFS disk with linux? Or, does the fact that you are doing a bit-for-bit restore bypass the entire NTFS problem?

My apologies in advance if it is too simple a question, but I'm new to linux and can't seem to find the answer anywhere else, at least not with enough authority that I'm willing to risk trying it.

Thanks,

A bit copy is just that. You will be copying bits, not files, therefore the source and target filesystem type is immaterial. This information will also be duplicated in a partition or disk cloning. For this reason, be prepared to resize your partition and/or filesystem to completely fill the space you have made for it.

Whether you will have issues because of your ntfs, I do not know. When you reboot to exPee, it will probably automatically perform a filesystem check. What else it may do ...

One small point on cloning the WinXP OS, assuming you're running a legit, activated copy (that's another whole debate!) you will have problems when you boot the drive because of Windows piracy protection. If you try to change too much hardware (like the hard drive) it crashes on load. There is a workaround, I remember finding in on Google a few months back, but alas I don't have it bookmarked. It was something to do with Windows 98 boot disks and recreating the MBR with the Recovery Console CD or something of that ilk.

Having said all that, perhaps neilsanner got it to work?

Cheers - Callum.