On 12/07/10 16:45, Mark Rogers wrote:
It looks like dd will be the most reliable but slow, ntfsclone faster but won't handle the partitioning, so ideally a tool which combines the two will do what I need.
I presume these two disks aren't configured as Dynamic Disks, as that is going to give you problems even with the commercial offerings.
NTFSclone will be a lot faster than a direct image clone but a direct disk to disk clone is troublesome with ntfsclone, it doesn't clone the partition map or the MBR etc and it doesn't natively support resizing on the fly (you'd have to apply nftsresize to the image nftsclone makes before writing a new partition map to the new disk) then you would have to grab the MBR etc with dd and shove it on as well. By the time you have cloned from original to image and then from image to new and messed about with MBR's and partition maps you may as well do it the slow way with dd and then resize with gparted or something.
SATA to SATA and 80GB isn't going to take that long.
Another way would be using Parted Magic http://partedmagic.com/ , it's also available on the latest version of the UBCD.
Unlike Jim I have found G4L quite useful but I think it lacks the tools you need to resize, Parted Magic is probably better in almost all circumstances now.
Also be aware on Vista at least I have had issues where after resizing an NFTS volume, It wouldn't appear as the correct size in Windows despite being ok in recovery console and from Linux. I think I had to use a very new version of gparted to change the volume size a bit again before the new size registered.