copying contents of one hdd over to another

[Genesys]

short of getting the norton ghost utility, is there any way [read free] to effictively copy the contents of one hdd to another? im wanting to copy EVERYTHING because my current hdd is dying and im about to go get a replacement.

thx for any help.

 

[drag]

Well you can do it with linux. Providing it's a file format that Linux can deal with you can use the cp command.

I've done it to move linux installs from one place to another. It's easiest when the computer is down and your using a boot cd of course, because then you don't have to aviod directorie like /tmp /proc that have information about the proccess your using to copy.

You partition and format the drive and all that. Say your first HD is setup as the primary master and the second harddrive is setup as the secondary master (and all your information is on the first partition of both drives) and your using a boot cd or whatnot you can go like this:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/harddrive1
mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/harddrive2

cp -dpR /mnt/harddrive1/* /mnt/harddrive2

That probably wouldn't work with Windows stuff. NTFS isn't supported well and the permissions for Fat32 may get Fubared. Also MS may have some special files setup that may cause it not to work.

That would work great for just data files, except for NTFS stuff.

The second way that people use is the dd command, which does the samething that ghost does, just minus all the fancy stuff.

If both harddrives are the same size, or the second drive is bigger and you can take parted or partition magic to resize the partitions later on you can go:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc

And that will mirror the information from drive 1 to drive 2. (in linux the names are /dev/hda = primary master, /dev/hdb = primary slave, /dev/hdc = secondary master, and /dev/hdd = secondary slave. Partitions are the number of the partition added onto the name of the harddrive. So that /dev/hdc3 would be the third partition on the secondary master IDE device. CDROMS and such will also use the /dev/hd# type stuff most of the time if they are IDE based (and not under SCSI emulation), but they don't have partitions)

The advantage to that command is that it will save the entire drive. Including MBR, so that if the first drive was bootable the second drive would be too.

If you just want the info on the partition, then make a partition on the second drive as close to the same size (maybe a bit bigger) as the partition you want to save. Then you would go like this:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1

That won't save the MBR or anything like that, but you can copy stuff from the first partition and stick it into the second or third partition or whatever on the second harddrive.

DD rocks.

Of course all this will make more sense if you understand some linux basics. But this is pretty much what ghost does on a basic level. You can even make drive images if you'd like. like this:

dd if=/dev/hda of=driveimage.img

or cdrom images like this:

dd if=/dev/hdb of=cdrom.iso

Which you can go and burn to any CD "as a iso image" in Linux and in Windows.

 

[Genesys]

not using linux, thx for the info though, ill have to remember that for future use.

 

[MtnMan]

Many new disk drives come with a bootable floppy that will do this for you, increasing partition size and all while it does it. Partition Magic is another option, but that one isn't free. Go to the web site for what every drive you are installing and see if you can download the setup disk that normally comes with that drive.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Genesys
not using linux, thx for the info though, ill have to remember that for future use.

ya sure. Copy and paste it into a file if you want to keep track of it.

If you want to try it out go and get toms root boot disk. It's just something that you put on a floppy disk to use.

It's a handy thing to have around, all that I told you is pretty common, if you need better explanations use google and you can get some very good documentation here and their about everything. If you realy know what your doing you can do some realy keen stuff with DD and other tools to backup drives and fling images across networks and such. Just normal everyday unix utilities if you string them together just right you can do stuff that would take hundreds of dollars of software to do with commercial stuff.

 

[Relayer]

acronis true image has a trial version i think. www.acronis.com

 

[pitupepito2000]

I would personally recommend you go and download a linux rescue cd or floppy, and try the commands that drag gave you. I prefer the dd command it's pretty simple, and not too much stuff to do. If you don't want to use linux, then you probably have to try to find a shareware or free program, you can try download.com and see if you can download a program that will meet your needs.

 

[Abzstrak]

most harddrive manufacturers either bundle free software to do it, or have it as a free download on their website.... I'd check there first as the easiest answer....