I am a near total Linux newbie. I got an old XP box (Pentium III) with a failed drive. I borrowed a 40GB HDD and tried installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it. I've been working at it for the last two weeks. Now that I've got a system that works, I have to return the borrowed drive. I'll buy a new 60 or 80GB IDE drive and I want to transfer everything from the old drive to the new one so that I can replace the old drive with the new one and everything will work. I believe the process is called cloning. I've read some of the posts about it but there was always something not clear to me in all of them.
What's the easiest and/or the most effective way to go about it? Remember, I'm a "noob" so please give as much details as possible, particularly if I have to go to the Terminal.
Thanks

Buy a 40 gig HDD and give that one back except you are in it for the learning effect..

Easiest solution is as previous post stated and that is just buying a new 40G drive as a replacement and give back the new one. If you want to step up to a larger drive, check out AwsomeMachine's post on learning the DD command.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506

Here is how it is done.

(1) Always buy a disk bigger than the source you want to clone.

(2) Connect the new disk to the PC.

(3) Boot up a Live CD (any one will do, my favourite is Kanotix), use it to check the disk status by command "fdisk -l", which will list all the partitions of every disk in the PC. If the new disk is connected correctly it will show up there but without any partition. That is normal.

(4) Assuming the old source disk is hda and the new target disk is hdb the cloning is one line of command in terminal mode (date statement to show time only and can be omitted, the bs parameter instructs dd the size of each transfer and 32768 is one complete track of 64 times 512 bytes)
(5) Make tea or go out to play and come back half an hour or one hour depending on how fast is your computer. Mine clones 25Gb in 7 minutes transferring at 58Mb/s yesterday. You can calculate the time taken between the two "date" statement.

Warning in the dd command if=input file and of=output file, make absolutely clear "if" is your source.

There is no need to partition nor to format. The target disk will boot same as the source. The new disk's extra space, for being bigger than the source disk, is unallocated. You cannot clone a bigger disk into a smaller disk.

More information in the first link of my signature.

dd is a hardware copying sector by sector (512 bytes per sector). It does not deal with the filing systems so will be successfull in any system (Dos, Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD and in any combination) In dd you get a mirror image of the original. No more and no less but exactly a 100% clone.

Thanks.
Does that mean that if I use a bigger hard drive I'll have to use the rest of the drive as a second partition? Isn't there a way to end up with only one bigger partition?
Also, do I have to boot from a live CD, couldn't I just do it from the original drive?
Thanks

dtate
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=32768
date

Might wanna edit that.

You can use QTParted, available in many Live CD, to incorporate free hard disk space into a Linux partition.

You can run dd with a boot-up Linux to do the cloning.