Hard Drive Copying?

[Clarky]

I've got 2 hard drives. One a WD 200gb that i've used for years. The other a recently purchased WD Raptor. Now I only use roughly 20gb of the 200GB and I want to primary boot from the Raptor and use the 200gb for storage.

What I want to do is copy everything (CLONE) the 200GB HD onto the raptor. How do I do this? I heard Norton Ghost is a good program to use but I need a bit of help using it. Are there any other simpler programs that do this?

[peterb]

This has cropped up a couple of times in the last week or so - simplest and cheapest way is to use the dd command from a linux live CD.

dd if=/dev/source_drive of=/dev/destination_drive

can't get much simpler than that! There are more details here:

http://forums.hexus.net/help-technic...ml#post1284821 (The details are towards teh end of a discussion on raid arrays)

[Clarky]

I've got a ubuntu linux live cd. What do i do?

[peterb]

install the destination drive (I'm assuming here that the source drive is the primary ide drive on the fist ide channel and the destination drive is a slave on the secondary ide channel)

Boot to the live CD

CHECK THE DRIVE DESIGNATIONS!! In the example I gave above, the source will be hda and the destination hdd (don't bother about the numbers - they refer to the partitions and you are cloning the drive - partitions and all.

Open a terminal window (for command line)
Type the following commands:

su (changes you to root)

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd (obviously change hda and hdd to reflect your own set up)

Go and have a cup of tea while it does it. When it has, re-install the destination drive as the master and reboot. Once you are happy it is OK, re-install the second drive as your secondary drive and partition as required.

(Bit more info about cloning here http://forums.hexus.net/operating-sy...ml#post1277710)

[Clarky]

Thanks for that.

[peterb]

No problem - remember to check and double check the drive assignments - and the command line because it will do exactly what you type in - there are no software generated messages like "This will destroy all the data on disk xxx are you sure you want to do that?" or any other checks - it will just do as you ask - in this case a bit by bit copy from sector 0 (and every subsequent sector) of the source drive to the destination - until it runs out of sectors.