My current WinXP rig has a failing master drive. The drive is 250gb broken into 3 partitions.

I bought a new 1TB drive that I would like to mirror the old drive onto then add a 4th 750gb partition.

What is the best tool to use to clone the windows drive so that I get the boot partition etc... and all the partitions come out right?

I know I can DD but that might take forever, is there a better way? I know it'll be slow since the drives will be hooked to the Debian box via usb2 but they can sit and do their things for days if necessary. I don't use the XP box much...

Didn't xp use ntbackup with system state? Pretty sure that was the official way MS wanted you to do it.

Sometimes the hard drive companies offer a free clone solution that works great. May have to download it from their site.

Could consider clonezilla or redobackup as a test.

Wow, that ntbackup looks confusing with all those options. I have no idea what most of that means.

Most drive companies don't offer Linux solutions which is the only computer I will have to do the work. I can't tie up mu Win8 laptop cuz I need it for work.

I will look into the other two utilities and see what their about... Thanks!

Perhaps clonezilla could help.
http://clonezilla.org/

The makers offer some software that runs as stand alone too usually. You boot to the media and clone.

NTbackup is pretty easy.

You can also purchase any number of commercial products like Acronis and a few others.

Not sure how long it would take to clone using dd. It isn't a perfect method for windows. G4U uses dd but offers various compression levels to transfer data to an image. Not sure compression would help on drive to drive.

I'm using the WD tool http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...l.asp?swid=119 and looks like it's Acronis which you mentioned. It's humming along well so far so I got my fingers crossed that the old drive holds out until it completes...

"ATIWD is based on the award winning Acronis True image Home 2013 backup, restore and disaster recovery program."

And you used to get into the nuts and bolts of the distro to see it was linux on the live booted media. Maybe you still can access it. I don't own Acronis but I have known it to be a very good program for a number of years. They may still have a way to create backups fully free. When disaster strikes you only have to purchase a cheap version and restore. Pretty good and fair way I'd think.

Worked perfect, took less than an hour and it resized my partitions... Can't beat that for free... Thanks for all the advice...

You have a good thought, I'm going to make a image of my main drive while I have everything apart. This way if my system crashes I can easily restore it to this point.

Thanks for the update and solution.

Glad you got it fixed.

There should be a solved button.