From: "Oliver Ruebenacker" <curoli@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 2008, March 14 12:01
Dear friends,
I need to copy the hard disk of a Windows computer to a new hard
disk of equal size. I was thinking of connecting both drives
(SATA/150), booting from the Fedora 8 Rescue Disk and then do
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
in hope that after that, the second hard disk can be used in place
of the first one (including booting Windows, of course).
Does this work? Thanks!
Take care
The drive does not even need to be the same size. I had a disk that
had developed read/write errors to several blocks which prevented
booting Windows. I got a larger disk and copied to that disk. It worked
and the rest of the disk became available, without even needing to
reregister XP SP2. With judicious use of "CONV=" parameters you can
get it to blow by the errors but fill the output blocks that are
blown by with zeros. That MAY (read will) result in lost data on a
chkdisk. But the disk should manage to come back if certain critical
parts are not damaged.
HINT: I tested with a Linux system with enough space on hard disk to
store the partition. Then I used mount to check if the partition would
mount. Once I got that working copying the partition to the new disk
was easy.
{^_^}
