Littleberry said:
I have a 40 gig harddrive that is formatted to a proprietary OS, and I
also have a new 40 gig of the same model that is formatted fat32. I would
like to get a boot floppy that would let me put the non-dos hd in drive
C:, the new hd in drive D:, and then make an exact sector-2-sector clone.
Wat program will allow me to do that? Will Norton's Ghost do that for
non-standard formatted hd's? Littleberry
If a boot CD, rather than a boot floppy, is acceptable, then you could use
something like Knoppix (
www.knoppix.com), which is a Linux distribution that
runs off the CD and a RAM disk. Assuming the two drives are IDE, and
connected like you specify, you'd type "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" to do a
sector level copy of the first drive onto the second. Same goes for the
various other CD-based Linux distributions (e.g., SuSE's live eval CD would
work for this, I expect).
In fact, the installation disc from pretty much any major Linux distribution
can probably be used for this. Many of them have a way to get to a command
prompt before you start installing, and from this command prompt you can do
the dd command given above. For example, on the Redhat installation discs,
start a text-mode installation, and where it gets to the welcome screen,
after the media check screen, you can hit ALT-F2 to switch to a command
prompt.
To make sure you've got the disks right, you can dump the partition table
with this command:
fdisk -l /dev/hda
to list the partition table of the first disk, and
fdisk -l /dev/hdb
for the second disk. If the disks aren't IDE, then try /dev/sda and
/dev/sdb.
It's probably a good idea to get Knoppix, though, because it is useful to
have around. It can read Windows filesystems, including NTFS, and so is
very useful if something is screwed up and you need to look around outside
of Windows to see what is going on. They've got over 2 gig of stuff on the
Knoppix CD, so it is very full-featured. It is not a stripped down recovery
system or anything like that.
