[ale] OT: Copying a complete hard drive

[John Wells]

Nathan J. Underwood said:
> You could also use partimg, but you may need a 3rd machine as a storage
> area for the resulting image.
>
> Boot to Knoppix on the desktop with the XP install.  Start partimg, and
> 'image' that drive to a file (don't recall if there's an option to image
> to another drive, but if there is, I've not tried it).  Once that's
> complete, boot to Knoppix on the laptop, and choose the reverse (image
> the hard drive from the image file).  We're currently experimenting with
> this at work and it works pretty good.  We used to use Ghost (at a
> former employer), but there's no funding for it here.  Partimg seems
> slower, but it seems to work, and it's free.  Plus, if you have nic's
> that can boot to the LAN, a Knoppix terminal server will remove the need
> to tote the Knoppix CD around with you (just boot to the network on the
> target machine(s)).

Nathan,

Awesome.  Thanks for the link.  Just what I was looking for (don't really
have the budget for Ghost either :)).

Can you "image" the file across to and from the network, out of curiosity?
 I have a 120GB drive in the machine I'll be imaging, so I can easily save
the image there.  But to get it over to the laptop drive, I'll have to
either remove the laptop harddrive and drop it in the desktop with an
adapter, or restore it from the network.

I'll take a look at the partimage documentation as well.  Thanks again for
the link.

John