dd blocksize when copying to SSD disk

[Shamim Shahriar]

On 31/08/2016 20:40, Mike Clarke wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 Aug 2016 14:49:25 Kevin P. Neal wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 06:35:28PM +0200, Christoph P.U. Kukulies wrote:
>>> I'm about to copy an existing Windows 7 system to an SSD. Source drive 
>>> is a hard disk of 256 GB, destination drive a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Given the fact that unnecessary write operations to SSDs should be 
>>> avoided I'm thinking about the best strategy to use dd to write to the
>>> SSD.
>> I'm not sure that dd is the best strategy. Using Windows to do the copy
>> may be better.
> But the Windows copy command isn't very good at copying the entire system, it 
> will fail to copy open files and certain "special" system files. On the other 
> hand dd will copy everything in the partition but at the expense of wasting 
> space by copying all the unused blocks.
>
> An alternative would be to use Driveimage XML
> <www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm> from within Windows to create a 
> compressed backup of all used blocks in the system. It's also available on a 
> Knopixx live CD <www.runtime.org/data-recovery-live-cd> which, I think, runs 
> it under wine so it could probably be run under wine on FreeBSD to create or 
> restore a backup of an entire Windows partition.
>
As far as I can remember G4L has the provision of copying NTFS
partitions data-only. We used to use it to create/transfer image from a
sysprepped system to numerous other machines. The good bit was that it
did not need a running windows as G4L comes with its own bootable
image/iso. Have you considered that yet?

Hope this helps.