[geeks] Windows: move to new hard drive (forgive me)

[Jonathan Groll]

On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 11:27:41AM -0700, Dan Duncan wrote:
> On 12/10/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> > Situation:
> >
> > Windows XP on 40GB hard drive.
> >
> > Desired situation:
> >
> > Windows XP on 160GB hard drive.
> >
> > What's the easiest way to just move the whole thing to the new drive?
> >
> > Will something like Acronis True Image do it?
> 
> You can boot your favorite linux cd and use dd to do it.  The MBR is
> the first 512 bytes of the drive.
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc count=1 bs=512

If you're scared of dd, how about using partimage for linux?

First step: use windows file system tools to create a new partition on
the new drive, and format it for NTFS. So you'll have both drives in the
machine simulataneously.

Next save a copy of partimage (www.partimage.org) on some accesible
drive, choose the statically compiled binary. Boot machine using knoppix
so that filesystem is not active, and simply copy the partition contents
across using the partimage binary. This works and will be bootable, even
for NTFS in my experience (did it with my Wife's machine), even though
partimage claim "experimental only" support for NTFS.

Cheers,
Jonathan