OT: Cloning windows XP with dd

[Dan Lund]

I haven't ever done it like that, I've always done an entire disk with dd.
Never worried about doing a partition at a time....

On 10/7/05, Vaughn Treude <vltreude at deru.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>         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.
>         The original drive was 120 GB.  The new one was a bit larger but I
> didn't worry about the wasted space.  It was a slow operation, though.
> Copying the 5 GB compaq recovery partition took almost half an hour, and
> copying the rest took all night!
>         The problem is that once this was done, it would not boot from the new
> drive.  I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong.  I could see the
> contents of the new drives under both Knoppix and XP (well, I couldn't
> see the recovery partition under XP but what do you expect?)  It would
> still boot with the old drive so the cable must have been OK.  I tried
> both cable-select and setting the jumpers explicitly, to no avail.
>         Symptoms:  On boot, the screen is blank except for a blinking cursor at
> the upper left-hand corner.  It even skips the hardware info screen with
> the HP logo.  If I hit the F-key (was it F2?) quickly I can view the
> BIOS, and it sees the new Seagate drive just fine.
>         I suspect that Compaq/HP (or possibly Microsoft) has put some devilish
> twist in their setup to make it difficult for people to replace their
> own drives.  If this was under warranty, we'd send it back, but that's
> long past.  If it was my system (and not my sister's) I'd wipe out the
> stupid XP and install some flavor of Linux.  Has anyone dealt with this
> silly problem before?
>
> Thanks!
> Vaughn
>
> P.S.  Yes I did set the boot flag on the NTFS partition on the second
> drive.
>
>
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