Hello all

First, I'm new here, forgive me if I've posted this in the wrong forum, it doesn't quite seem right for Hardware to me...

I'm trying to copy an NTFS partition from one drive to another and I'm stuck. I want to copy /dev/hda1 (20Gb NTFS partition on a 60Gb disk) to /dev/hdb (30GB disk, no partitions).

I've tried:
Which I picked up from another board, this fails and complains about in being unrecognised. Maybe this was old, anyway I then tried 'if' and 'of' instead:
and now get this error: "dd: writing '/dev/hdb1': No space left on device"

Is this because I need to create a partition to write to first? What do I need to do to get this to work? Or am I missing something else?

Thank you in advance

Al :-)

you will need an exiting partition of the correct size. i think it can also be larger than required, but the extra space will just be lost i.

Thanks Chris

That made sense to me! I've made a partition on the second disk, I couldn't figure out how to make one the same size because of the geometry diffferences but using the sectors option of fdisk seemed to work like a charm.

So it's dd'ing now, we'll see how it turns out!

Thanks again,

Al

try http://partimage.org/

dd works fine if you want to clone a drive to another and don't care about preserving any content on the target drive. In that case no partitions are needed on the target drive, it can be blank the way it comes when new. (File system agnostic) This copies any partitions and their content on the source drive to the target. So if the source is a 160Gb and the target a 320Gb drive then the target has become partitioned as 160GB when finished since it's an exact copy of the source. That can be adjusted later using some partitioning tool.

Example (your device names may vary, take care

sudo dd if=/dev/sda bs=4k of=/dev/sdb

The source drive is 60GB, but the OP said he/she only wants to copy a 20GB partition from the source drive, not the entire drive including the MBR. There may be other partitions on the source drive, it is not common practice to only use a third of a drive and let the other 40GB sit wasted.
This is bad advice in this particular case. DD is dangerous when following bad advice.
If the OP would have asked for a little lesson in using dd, maybe this advice would apply in this case.

The best tutorial I have ever come across for dd is here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...light=tutorial

It has become an invaluable reference for me and many others.

Could you use ntfsclone?
Yes, those options are the right way around. Resizing the resulting 20GB image on hdb is an exercise left for the reader...or Google. :-)

If the two disks are reporting different geometries, then dd is likely to fail on the copy.

The last time I did that I was copying an NTFS partition off of a failing disk, and I kept having problems getting a good copy. I finally just created the new partition on the new disk and did a cp -ri from the old partition to the new one.