[PLUG] Copying Hard Disk to Hard Disk

m0gely m0gely at telestream.com
Fri Apr 14 07:11:22 UTC 2006


Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> My wife has a 4GB hard drive on her Win98 machine and needs more room. 
> The simple solution was to add a 13GB drive as a second drive. 
> Unfortunately, she needs to run a disk space hogging program that will 
> only install on the "C" drive (and is only available for Winders).
> 
> My question:
> 
> Can I boot up the machine with Knoppix (or similar) and copy the first 
> drive to the second in a way that, when I swap the drives, the second 
> drive boots just as if it was the first drive, but is now 13GB? (I would 
> swap cables and adjust jumpers on the drives.)

Yes.  Boot to DOS by pressing F8 just as Windows starts to load, you 
must be quick.  Run FDISK and set the primary partition on the D:\ drive 
to "Active".  Exit FDISK and do "format d: /q /s".  This will quick 
format the drive and make it bootable.  I know on floppies you can just 
do "sys a:" and it will make the disk a system disk (bootable) w/o the 
format, but I can't remember if that works on hard drives.  It's worth a 
try.  If it doesn't work it will just tell you you can't do that.

Now boot to Knoppix and just copy everything over.  Note; I didn't say 
move.  You will get a few files being over written (the boot files), 
that's ok.  The /s option on the format command was still necessary.

Now reboot after swapping your cables and boot to the larger drive to 
verify all went well.

If you're a whiz at partition editing then the dd/image method may be 
fastest.  But this method isn't far behind at all.

-- 
- m0gely
http://quake2.telestream.com/
Q2 | Q3A | Counter-strike



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