dd makes an identical copy, so the drives need to be identical and you end up with an "image" of the previous drive.
Your distro needs to have NTFS support (some don't out of the box, such as Red Hat/Fedora because of their "not-tainted" open source licensing), of course to do the following.
Personally, I would install the drives in the Linux box, partition and format the destination drive as desired, then pipe it over with tar.
If you just want just one large fat32 partition, however, a Windows 98 boot floppy might be best used to format the destination drive. Unplug all drives except for the destination drive and put it on the first ide slot as master, boot with the floppy and format C:/
If you use fdisk to make several partitions, it can also be used to change the filesystem type to vfat or ntfs as well as many other filesystems, but Windows partitions can't retain Linux permissions, so don't attempt to use the p flag in tar (keep permissions).
See man fdisk and man tar.
# Clone a distro to another drive or move directories around
Install drive in box and ensure BIOS can detect it. Boot into Linux and login to your user's account. Open an x terminal and partition and format the new drive as you wish
Code:
[fancy@tinwhistle fancy]$ su -
Password:
[root@tinwhistle root]# fdisk /dev/hdb
Exit with
w to write the partition table.
Format the partitions with the chosen filesystems:
mke2fs /dev/hdbX -> ext2
mke2fs -j /dev/hdbX -> ext3
mkswap /dev/hdbX -> swap
mkreiserfs /dev/hdbX -> reiserfs
mkfs.xfs /dev/hdbX -> xfs
Make directories for source and destination mount points. You need these to keep out of an endless loop of copying itsself over and over.
Code:
[root@tinwhistle root]# mkdir /mnt/source
[root@tinwhistle root]# mkdir /mnt/destination
Mount your os partitions that you want to clone on /mnt/source
Mount your partitions on the new drive, making directory entries for your separate partitions (/boot, /home, /var etc.). If you are just copying a directory such as var, just cd to the directory you wish to copy instead of mounting partitions on /mnt/source.
Now, cd to /mnt/source and pipe it over with tar
Code:
[root@tinwhistle root]# cd /mnt/source
[root@tinwhistle source]# tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/destination && tar xBf -)
Edit /etc/fstab as needed, install the boot loader if you moved a whole distro, and it should work when it is installed in it's final position.
