A friend asked me to help him upgrade his old computer by installing a larger harddrive. His computer currently is running Windows XP and has a 10GB Western Digital harddrive in it. He doesn't want to keep the old drive so the new drive I install for him is going to be the only one in the machine.

To avoid having to reinstall Windows and all the headaches that come along with that I have installed a 200GB Seagate drive as a second harddrive in the machine for now. My plan is to clone his current Windows XP install to the new larger drive.

After physically installing the harddrive I booted into Knoppix. The harddrives are seen as this:

My first thought was to use a command like this: but then I read that if I run that command on two different models of harddrives that problems will occur. For instance if I were to run that exact command then the 200GB Seagate would be seen as a 10GB Western Digital because "dd copies the entire disk image (including the label {vtoc})." I found that quote in an old forum post in a google search I did. It is here if you want to look at it: http://www.unix.com/archive/index.php/t-7243.html

So is dd the way to go or not? Is there another way to do this?

My ultimate question is - what is the best opensource/free, Unix/Linux method to clone an existing Windows XP install from one harddrive to another in the same system?

Try this thread for the definitive dd command guide.

Baldrick

I'd probably use ntfsclone (from the ntfsutils package) for this, rather than dd.

Yes it will work.

Just did one myself to transfer a 300Gb sata into a 400Gb sata.

The 300Gb image is copied to the 400Gb disk which will be left with 100Gb unallocated empty space afterward. It took 1 h 37m running at 51.9Mb/s transfer rate when I set the block size bs=32768. The distro was Kanotix Live CD. A software like Partition Magic can incoporate the empty space into any partition in minutes.

Take a look at my signature as I documented the first Link to use Linux to clone XP.

dd will work on any smaller source disk into a bigger target disk.

saikee - That was a good write-up you linked to over on the other forum.

You said one thing over that that really caught my attention:
Do you know why this is? I can't come up with a good reason for the slower copy using a LiveCD. Other than the initial load speed of reading dd from a CD vs. a HDD, I would have thought everything else would heave been done from memory. And compared to the copy time for a HDD, load time for the dd command would be totally insignificant. Was this test done on the same system using the same source/target HDD's?

Yep I used Knoppix 3.6 at the time.

25Gb is pretty small by today's standard for cloning and so the cache menory size would have played a part.