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Subject : Re: LUG: New hard drive! Need help copying my data over and stuff.

From : Edward Anderson <nilbus@nilbus.[redacted]>

Date : Thu, 06 May 2010 11:22:01 -0400

Parent

I wish I'd seen this earlier - I wrote a guide on this back in 2005.

http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

dd works great for copying windows from one drive to another. If you have a lot of free space, however, it can be more inefficient than ntfsclone, which is filesystem aware. On any computer with BIOS newer than the DOS days, disk geometry values are logical (not physical) and don't typically vary from disk to disk. Even if it did, the differences are limited to the partition table, which you can rewrite. If course, if you do want to resize your NTFS partition, copy it first and then use ntfsresize or the Vista equivalent to resize the partition.

Edward

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Richard Carter < rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

1. I'd avoid dd. Disk dumps sound like a great idea in theory. But all of the OS hardware will change, the partition tables will change, everything in /etc will change, etc.

But I don't have a Linux partition to migrate, only Windows. Furthermore, I'm swapping hard drives in one computer, not migrating an old computer to a new computer. I'm simply upgrading my laptop's hard drive, all the hardware will remain the exact same.
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And trying to do a disk dump from your original 160G hard drive to a partition on your 500... holy moly.
But... it would only be a 160gb transfer. I mean, sure it would take some time despite being USB 2.0 but it's not THAT outrageous... right?