[lug] Dup linux and win boot drives to bigger replacement drives

[Hugh Brown]

karl horlen wrote:
>> I have had good luck with partimage
>> <http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page>
>> for things like this. It can also be used to 'back
>> up' the system with a
>> snapshot of the current partitions.
> 
>> My practice is to boot from SystemRescueCd
>> <http://www.sysresccd.org/>
>> and then copy to an external drive via USB or
>> another system running
>> partimaged.
> 
> I guess I'll have to read those sites.  have you used
> these techniques on WIN (not just linux)?
> 
> I don't have a USB port on the linux system and it's
> old enough where i don't really want to go buy a usb
> card for it.  Since the drives are currently scsi
> based, could i just plug the ide drive i want to be my
> boot drive into one of the IDE controllers and dup the
> boot scsi drive to the ide drive with these tools?
> 
> also, since i would be duping a smaller boot drive to
> a larger drive, would that prevent me from using all
> of the drive space on the larger drive?  I'm thinking
> that a drive dup dupes the partition table and the
> partition itself?  So how does one get around that?
> 
> thanks


I've recently used knoppix w/ qtparted and dd to take a windows box from 
a 20g disk to a 160g disk to an 80 gig disk.

In both instances, I ran the file system defrag tool before doing 
anything.  When I went 20 to 160, I used dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb 
where the 20g was on primary master and the 160 gig was on primary 
slave.  After the dd finished I think I booted back into windows, let it 
do its thing, booted back into knoppix and used qtparted to expand the 
partition to full size (leaving 8mb at the end).

when I wanted to go to a smaller drive, I defragged, shrank the 
partition to 55 gig (I think I had 50gig on the disk) using qtparted, 
booted back into windows to let it be happy about disk, booted back into 
knoppix and used dd to copy the 160g disk (with the 55g partition) to an 
80 gig disk.  It took forever and complained that it ran out of space on 
the device.  I booted the 80g disk, let windows do its thing, back to 
knoppix to resize the partition to the full size of the disk (had to 
leave 8mb dead space at the end) and my wife/kids have been using the 
windows box for about a week w/ no ill effects.

 From a linux perspective, scsi to ide shouldn't be an issue.  I don't 
know if windows will get cranky or not.

FWIW,

Hugh