Another HDD clone question.

[Moparmike]

I've got a friend with an older HP comp loaded with XP looking to upgrade his hard drive.

The problem is it doesn't have restore CDs...just a "hidden" partition with the rescue stuff. What process would I use to clone this entire 40Gb drive onto a new 120Gb drive?

I've cloned partitions before using Ghost, but I no longer have that on my Winders machines. I plan on mounting his old drive and the new drive in one of my Linux rigs to do the work.

Any problems with mounting the source drive as USB external and cloning to the target hooked up to the EIDE cable, or would it be better to have both hooked up EIDE?

Can I use dd to do a bit-for-bit clone of the new drive and use qparted afterwards to enable the unused space on the new drive?

Thanks!

[retsaw]

Can I use dd to do a bit-for-bit clone of the new drive and use qparted afterwards to enable the unused space on the new drive?
Yes, that would be the way I'd do it.

You'll probably get better performance with both drives hooked up using the IDE interface so long as they are on seperate channels, but it would work with one of them connected through USB if you wanted to do it that way.

[Moparmike]

I'm still having a bit of trouble with this clone job.

One problem is that the source drive has some bad sectors that are throwing input/output errors during the dd operation. I'm using the 'noerror' convention in the command line and the process will continue. Either because of the drive's partition layout or because of some bad sectors, fdisk /mbr doesn't work to restore the mbr after the dd process.

According to cfdisk, the "hidden" restore partition type is "compaq diagnostics" and the Windows partition is NTFS. Anyone know exactly what "compaq diagnostics" filesystem is, and will it affect how the MBR operates?

I'm thinking that I should be able to run Winblow's SFC command to restore any corrupt system files on either the source or the target hard drive, but this install doesn't have an administrator account password set up. I need one log into window's system recovery console (Yeah, I know...I'm just venting...and trying a few tricks to reset the Admin password on an OEM HP WinXPHome install. HAH! Should just nuke it!)

[saikee]

If you have bad sectors in the source disk it is a hardware problem and no cloning software can get over it.

Your best bet is to run Windows and defrag it as much as possible before cloning with dd.

The compaq diagnostic should be a FAT partition normally. However dd is immune to the filing system as it copy only the bits of each sector.

Cloning a 40Gb source into a 120Gb target is acceptable and you should end up with the 80Gb unallocated space, unless you have used up all the 4 primary partitions.