[PLUG] Copying Hard Disk to Hard Disk

m0gely m0gely at telestream.com
Sun Apr 16 17:07:17 UTC 2006


Richard C. Steffens wrote:

> To start over:
> 
> 1. Delete all the stuff I put on the large drive with dd.

1) Blank out the 13G drive however you wish.  Leave it with no partitions.

2) Install the 13G as a secondary drive and boot to the 4GB in DOS mode 
buy using F8 just as Windows starts up and before you see the splash screen.

3) Run FDISK in DOS and create one primary partition that spans the 
entire 13G disk, then set it to "active" also from the FDISK menu.  Make 
sure you have the right disk selected.  It should be obvious though.

4) Reboot (sorry, it's required before the format) and get back into DOS 
mode.  From the command line do "FORMAT D:\ /S" sans quotes.  This will 
format the drive and make it bootable.

** fun fact: 3 files are required to make a disk bootable to MS-DOS. 
The COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS & MSDOS.SYS.  This is what the /s option does.

5) Boot to Knoppix and "copy" or "drag-and-drop" the entire contents of 
files from the 4G drive to the 13G drive.  When finished, the root view 
of both drives should look identical, aside from one having more space.

6) Shutdown and remove the 4G drive and set the 13G to the primary 
master and start it back up.

7) ???

8) PROFIT!!!

As a side note, Knoppix and the like are great tools and no doubt have 
saved a Windows computer on more than one occasion.  But trying to do 
operations on one OS from another will most likely always have its 
caveats.  For anyone doing this with Win32 even on an infrequent basis, 
I recommend getting a hold of Barts WinPE boot disk.  In it's default 
form it's very basic.  But it will boot to a (stripped) graphic shell 
and allow you to do many rescue type tasks et al on any version of 
Windows to date.  With a few addons installed, it can be made to look 
like Windows 2000, have Firefox, AV, the Explorer shell, added driver 
support and much more.  All the above steps could be done by booting 
into this 'Windows Live CD' with no reboots, aside from making the 13G 
drive the primary.  As with my USB drive, it's one of my top tools.  And 
it's free, though not OSS.

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



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