[lug] Cloning a Windows XP laptop with Linux

[Daniel Webb]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 05:33:53PM -0600, David L. Anselmi wrote:

> You'd be better off piping to gzip and making a regular file unless you 
> expect to be able to boot the archive directly.  And you may need to pay 
> attention to which partitions you're doing:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hdb1 | gzip > /mnt/windows.clone # sda mounted on /mnt
> 
> You can also look at partimage, which is more efficient than dd.

If bof's not familiar with dd and command-line stuff (I'm assuming they're not
from the question), a complete set of commands to backup and restore is:

# Backup:
mount /dev/sda /mnt
cat /dev/hdb1 | gzip > /mnt/windows_clone.gz

# Restore:
mount /dev/sda /mnt
zcat /mnt/windows_clone.gz > /dev/hdb1

You have to do this with /dev/hdb1 unmounted for both backup and restore, so
you need Knoppix or something similar.  You can get a simple fast boot to a
command-line with Knoppix by entering "knoppix 2" at the knoppix boot screen.

If there are any problems with bad sectors (rare these days but I still see
it) you need to use dd_rescue.

I can't even remember how I did this kind of low-level system admin stuff
before Knoppix... I'm probably blocking it out of my memory.