Copying Drives with Ubuntu 8.10

I found a few how-tos online about how to make copies of hard drives using Linux and the command dd (also known as “disk destroyer”). While this may or may not have been faster that the method I found dd does have the potential to really hose your disks (one of the many guides to dd).

I recently needed to install XP on a Linux machine. I had just installed Ibex and I really didn’t want to install it again (this is a 1.8 P4, with 256 MB of ram, 20 GB IDE drive). I was given another hard drive and another stick of ram to double what I currently had. This was going to be a dump little demo box for an education program (more about that later).

I figured I could just drop the new drive in, install XP and then update grub to point to the 2nd disk with XP. For whatever reason, XP wants to write its bootloader no matter what the system looks like and if there isn’t an XP compatable partition, it cries and won’t continue.

Now, the simple solution is to just open up the case and make the linux disk the slave and the blank one for windows the master. As an exercies in copying disks (and because I didn’t want to open the case up AGAIN) I decided to just copy the data. I figured this would be a good thing to document and provide to the students later on.

Booting with the Ubuntu LiveCD I opened up gParted and was able to select the partitions from one drive and copy them to the other. gParted handled moving the data and everything. I set this up before lunch and let it do it’s thing. Things worked out well, no need to open up the case and swap drives around.