OT: Cloning windows XP with dd

[ben francom]

On 10/8/05, Vaughn Treude <vltreude at deru.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 20:09, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> > 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 <http://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
> >
> Hmmm, that's interesting. The instructions said to copy only 440 bytes
> because the partition table lived in the rest. Since you did that last,
> I'm surprised it didn't mess something up. Though the partitions were
> the same, I don't know if the actual contents of the table could differ
> at all due to disk geometry. If not, no problem. I will try copying
> the MBR again, at least those first 440 bytes.
> More likely though, it's something to do with that darned hidden
> partition. It appears the system you cloned didn't have one. I have
> been researching this issue and have found some venomous comments about
> Compaq/HP's weird setup. The hidden partition contains not only
> recovery info but it has files necessary for the boot. I know that's a
> common thing in the Linux world, but at least for us, everything's
> documented. I haven't yet found much useful info on this "feature".
> Thanks anyway,
> Vaughn
>
>
> > A bunch of reboots later (this is Windows after all), and it popped
> > up in my brand new drive.
> >
> > Kurt
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I've had great luck with g4u (ghost for unix). I think it's NetBSD based.
I've also heard about "Frisbee," from the University of Utah. But haven't
tested it out yet. I use g4u at work, and it works well for cloning multiple
machines. I'm pretty sure it still uses the dd command.
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