Brief description: cloned HDD1 -> HDD2 HDD1 partition 1 boots HDD1 partition 2 boots HDD2 partition 1 boots HDD2 partition 2 doesn’t boot Windows, but is bootable in general Now verbosely: In all the cases computer is the same. I have two Windows 7 installations on HDD1 – both are booting fine. I choose between them using standard Windows 7 boot loader menu. Technically there are 4 partitions: 100 MB Boot loader partition (active), Windows [...]

I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 Machine with 1 physical hard drive. I have an exact copy of the hardware of it, which I intend to use a a redundant backup in case my server fails (hardware or software). I’d like to routinely “clone” my production server’s hard drive, so that when it fails, I’ll just swap it with the latest clone. Is this even possible? If it is, what would be the simplest [...]

There’s been a number of questions regarding disk cloning tools (yes, I did search for it) and dd has been suggested at least once. I’ve already considered using dd myself, mainly because ease of use, and that it’s readily available on pretty much all run of the mill bootable linux distributions. To my question, what is the best way to use dd for cloning a disk. I don’t have much time to go around, and [...]

I have a Dell laptop with a 250 GB 5400 RPM system drive and a 200 GB 7200 RPM drive from Dell I would like to replace it with. I thought I could put this drive in the laptop, clone the disk, and then replace the 250 w/ the 200 and be good to go, but Dell has a proprietary SATA interface that is different for HD1 and HD2. Both of my disks have the [...]

Can anyone recommend a different CD bootable utility I might try to clone a hard disk drive? I’ve so far failed to perform the seemingly simple task of cloning the contents from a small hard disk drive onto a larger one. Apparently Hitachi (target) doesn’t offer a bootable utility for this. But, that’s okay because Western Digital (source) does! Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2 for DOS (CD) But, when I boot from its CD, [...]

I would like to copy stuff in bulk (reimage disk using dd) with netcat from host A to B via ssh encrypted channel on Linux. What commands should I type on both ends? Could you please explain what each parameter means? I was googling for a while, but could not find a concise walkthrough. Thank you! Copying from source to target where target has sshd running: dd if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh root@target ‘gzip -d [...]

Main goals is to have/being: Windows XP Main Linux installation “Some other” Linux installation which I am currently experimenting with. All three OS installations completely separate (at least to begin with). I won’t share /home between my Linux installations, as it might be that some applications I’m using are of different versions and thus have different config files in my $HOME. Able to wipe the current Windows XP installation and install a previous image of [...]

Exactly what part of the disk is a UUID stored on? MBR? Somewhere within the partition? Is it a calculated value, or randomly generated and recorded? The UUID is stored in the superblock (of which there are many copies in case one gets damaged). The value itself is generated using libuuid, which is part of the e2fsprogs suite. There are many libraries for generating UUIDs; RFC4122 is a good place to start as it describes [...]

A friend couldn’t seem to get Norton Ghost to clone a disk usably. I suggested using GParted, and (after running chkdsk /f on the NTFS partition – possibly the cause of Norton’s problem) took the following steps: Copied the recovery partition (at the end of the original drive) to the end of the new drive. Copied the system partition to the start of the new drive, and ‘stretched’ it to fill the empty space. After [...]

Let’s say I’m cloning a virtual machine containing a Linux server. What would you advice to change in the clone? I know – it’s kind of vague and depends on what services ware installed on linux but maybe you can throw some ideas? Right now I change: MAC addresses of virtual interfaces [in fact VMware does it for me] re-generate SSH certificates [including host certificates - /etc/ssh_host* in the Debian world] change the hostname What [...]