Mark,
I have used Symantec Ghost Solution Suite in the past to do exactly this to great effect - usually in conjunction with BartPE, you only require two or three files from Ghost and can use your existing window$ drivers for storage controllers. License and media for a single machine was just shy of £30 a couple of years ago IIRC, and if you are looking to purchase for 5 machines or more, additional licenses can be had for between £5 and £10.
My attempts at using partimage and g4u amongst others have been mixed, but in all cases I have found these were vastly more time consuming than the £30 cost of Ghost.
I'd love to hear of some FOSS that works at a comparable speed, however, so eager to hear others' experiences.
Jim
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Rogers" mark@quarella.co.uk To: "ALUG - mailing list" main@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Monday, 12 July, 2010 1:41:46 PM Subject: [ALUG] Quickest way to clone drives
I have some old servers to migrate to new hard disks (all running Windows Server). They have two SATA drives installed (and no spare capacity).
I plan on connecting two new drives on USB/SATA adapters, and booting to a Linux Live CD to copy the data. The drives are 80GB drives, about 50% utilised, NTFS partitions.
Which is the quickest software method to duplicate the disks? I'm looking for the shorted downtime I can get away with. I can look at commercial offerings if necessary (although they all want extra for copying server disks and I don't really need a pretty GUI). Obviously I'm looking for something which copies the structure and the data without copying all the blank space, so I assume that means it needs to understand NTFS. (It also needs to make the new disks bootable etc if the one being cloned was.)
Will it be significantly quicker to take one drive out and clone from one SATA port to another, then swap the drives around to clone the other disk? Bear in mind I would then be doing the two disks serially (and there'd be a few extra minutes of shutting the server down and swapping disks around as well). I could possibly clone one of hard disks using my laptop but that would be USB-USB and I can't see that being anything other than slow.
I know that I could do this all with dd but (I assume) it'll be relatively slow due to all the blank disk space being copied.