OT. Duplicating Disk.

[Leslie Jensen]

On 2010-09-28 13:00, Jorge Biquez wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> This is kind off topic.
>
> U have and "old" laptopn, an Acer Travelmate 4670. It has a sata disk,
> 120Gb. It has been working fine in all these years. I have installed
> Freebsd with its boot manager and inside has Windows and a distro linux.
> I choose what OS to use depending on my needs every time I boot.
>
> I have decided to give it fresh air and I bought a disk of 500GB.
> Instead of installing everything again I would like to duplicate entire
> disk, as is, with its MBR and all partitions for all the different OS's.
> I bought an USB enclosure that is working fine. The machine recognice
> the new disk if I attach it as a USB disk (in all OS no problem on
> that). As a test also I decided to change disks and install somethig, no
> problem at all.
>
> My question is. What would be your advice on what tool to use to
> duplicate entire disk? (the adjust of size for the partitions of each
> different OS can be done later, no problem I guess).
>
> I was recommend to use DiskImageXML, booting alone and copy the disk but
> it does not work. Not yet.
>
> I guess the problem is that the original disk still has a 4Gb partition
> with all the Acer tools , the first partition, to recover teh Windows XP
> origibal system (type or partition EISA). Not sure on that but that
> program is not working. I receive an error when booting.
> On my desktop I used to use old Norton Ghost 2003 with my IDE disk and
> still work fine, but here does not work at all since the USB ports are
> not recognized.
>
> Do you know of a program tool that can be used that boot alone, free if
> possible or cheap, that let me copy entire disk, as is, that do the job?
>
> I am sorry for the kind of off topic and thanks in advance
>
> Jorge Biquez
>

I've done what you want to do. Using the PartedMagic CD.

http://partedmagic.com/

  On the cd is the program Ghost4Linux. It can image disks with UFS 
partitions as well as long as you don't need to resize them.

/Leslie