OT: Cloning windows XP with dd

[Kurt Granroth]

On Oct 7, 2005, at 6:10 PM, Vaughn Treude wrote:
>     A while back I posted a question about cloning a Windows XP  
> drive using
> a Linux live CD such as Knoppix.  The suggestion to use "dd" was a  
> good
> one.  I googled this command and found detailed instructions on
> www.nilbus.com for doing this.  In short, they said to:
>     Use fdisk to create partitions on the new drive identical to  
> those on
> the old drive (using the -u option to display sectors rather than
> cylinders, which ensure that they'll be the same.)
>     Use dd to copy the 440 bytes of the boot partition.
>     Use dd to copy the contents of the other partitions.
[snip]

Heh, what a coincidence.  I cloned a WinXP partition using dd on  
Wednesday for the first.  It worked like a charm.

The one thing I did different was in copying the MBR.  Instead of  
copying parts of the boot partition (is there such a thing with  
Windows?), I copied the entire 512 bytes of the MBR.

My procedure, then was:

1. fdisk -u /dev/hda
2. fdisk -u /dev/hdd
3. fdisk /dev/hdd (make partition with the EXACT same size)
4. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdd1
5. dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd bs=512 count=1

A bunch of reboots later (this is Windows after all), and it popped  
up in my brand new drive.

Kurt