I plan to buy a new HD, but the problem is that I have everything set up right. My disk is partitioned as followed:

hda1 -> Windows drive
hda2 -> Fat drive
hda3 -> Gentoo System (/)
hda4 -> Swap
hda5 -> homedirs (/home)

Now I'd like to take an (almost) exact copy of this HD to a the new and larger HD. The problem is that WinME has to stay bootable w/Grub. I can install Grub in the MBR with a live cd, but how to copy the winME drive so it still boots?

thanks for all help,
elluva

i've seen that both WD and seagate HDs come with software to duplicate existing drives in
a system, though i've never worked with it.

but if you can get grub up (and gentoo), which you seem to think you won't have any
problems with, why then do you worry about windows -- you can always modify grub's
conf. and add an entry for hda1 to make windows bootable.

There are a few drive backup programs out there, but the ones I like are Acronis TrueImage, and Mondo Rescue.

Acronis TrueImage is a commercial app ($49.99 US) which allows you to backup a partition or entire hard drive to a compressed image file and can also clone one hard drive to another. The boxed version of TrueImage comes with an installation disk for Windows only, however it also comes with a bootable cd that is OS independent. If you buy the download version you will need to install on a windows pc with a CDRW in order to create the OS independent bootable cd. True Image allows you to create incremental backups, create and resize partitions and stores images on: hard disk drives (fat32 and NTFS only), network drives, CD-R(W), DVD-R(W), ZIP, Jazz and other removable media. Images can be spanned across multiple cd's. TrueImage is by far the easiest backup solution for Linux I have seen so far. They also have a new version for Linux, but comes only in the "server" version and thus is more expensive.

Mondo is a nice little command line program run under linux and the salient info about it can be had here:

http://www.mondorescue.org/about/about.html.

Mondo supports LVM, RAID, ext2/3, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, and VFAT (a.k.a FAT and FAT32). Complied RPMS and such for various distros lie here

http://www.mondorescue.org/download/...MS/index.html,

along with a bunch of other stuff that mondo needs to run (if you need it). The file your particularly interested in are the Mindi 1.0.x and Mondo 2.0.x packages. These are the current stabe versions of the main program.

But, aside from that, why don't you just back up the individual files themselves, too? It's a little more time consuming and you may have to re-setup some stuff, but having a "backup session" is always a good time to update packages and programs to newer versions. And that way you'll have the apps on disk if you ever need to re-install, etc. As I said, more time consuming, but it would seem to avoid problems. Hope this helps.

Hi,

I agree with Anaksunaman - Mondo Rescue is the ideal solution for your situation. The documentation is very good with information on restoring to new/blank hard drives with different disk geometry - see Section 9.2.4 at http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/down...storetips.html or http://www.chem.vu.nl/~stol/Mondo-Re...inux-HOWTO.pdf if you want to download and read/print the pdf.

This also allows for the problem if your transfer doesn't work you still have the full backup at that day on CD/DVD and can go back to that if any updates cause problems. I have had this happen recently with HP MegaRAID drivers during a kernel update - reboot and no HDD or SCSI devices part way through the boot process.

Thanks for the usefull reactions, I'll certainly try mondo this evening, when I find the time .


I am quite experienced in the linux area (not in grub though, I've always used LILO), but the thing is that grub boots windows with the chainloader. This means it uses the bootloader found on the given partition, right?
Well, if I would just copy the files from one disk to the other, then there is no bootloader installed in the new windows partition. This way windows wouldn't be bootable anymore, right?
As I've said, I really don't know much about grub, so could you explain what entry I would add in the conf-file?

again thanks for all the help,
elluva

This is a partial repost of another discussion I was having about getting GRUB to boot Windows...

You'll need to add a couple lines to the grub.conf file under /boot/grub/grub.conf similar to the following:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

The title can be anything you like, while hd0,0 indicates that this is the first partition on the first hard disk. If windows was loaded hypothecically on the 3 partition of the second hard disk, it would look like hd1,2.... you get the point. Secondly, you MUST INCLUDE THE LINE chainloader +1. This is REQUIRED for all MS OS if you wish to boot them with GRUB!! You may also need to add boot at the end of this to get this to work, like so:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

This is not necessarily required but who knows, it may come up. ..

Now, I'm pretty sure that you already know the above. While I've never done it myself, I don't believe you need anything special for Windows. The actual loader for Windows to my knowledge, actually resides in the MBR. So wouldn't this mean that all the necessary boot files for Windows were already on the Windows partition? Just a guess. You could also do a quick install of Windows and then restore the data backups. This might work as well. I just avoid the problem by reinstalling when I update hard disks, anyway....