Hello All,

I was wondering if anyone would know of a good software I could use to clone an NTFS partition under Linux.

I want backup the recovery partition of an Acer Aspire One Pro P531 before installing a permanent distro on it.

I tried Parted Magic but could not find any options to do so and gparted would get stuck after 6% of copying. I scouted other forums for a solution and apparently the gparted thing is quite common!

Any ideas what else I could try?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Have a Wonderful Christmas,


Atwin

I have always had good luck with partimage for making images of individual NTFS partitions.

You can always clone the entire partition by dumping the raw data to a file/another partition using disk dump (dd). make sure the blocksize you pass corresponds to the the smallest chache size of the participating disks.

this will also copy all partition header data (boot blocks if present, cryptoheader, etc.).

try checking out the dd manual page. it is however a significant bit slower then partimage and the alike tools, since it copies unused blocks of data as well (partimage only samples the data and its positions in the file system and implicitly sets everything else to 0. that's why it needs to understand the underlying filesystem and can't be used for example on unmounten luks partitions or individual disks raid arrays).

Thanks for all the replies. I shall try them in the coming days after the festive season.

Have a wonderful time,

Cheers,

Atwin.

There is actually a tool specifically for cloning NTFS partition called ntfsclone.
It's command line only though & not the easiest to use. I recommend using Clonezilla Live to do the job. It works very well for cloning any kinda partition or even entire disks. It's actually a frontend to many of the cloning tools like partimage, ntfsclone and dd.