Lucas Posted December 16, 2008 Share Posted December 16, 2008 Hi, I NEED HELP!!!!!! :D [situation] I have a laptop with 120GB HDD (SATA) I travel around with it, along with my data, projects and photos.... u know....120 GBs is not enough for people who like to keep lots and lots of movies...songs.... now I am running out of HD space :( .....so I decided to buy a new 320GB HDD for my laptop and keep the 120 GB as portable hard disk..... [Question] My question here is, HOW DO I CLONE THE ENTIRE HDD (120GB) TO MY NEW 320GB HDD. So that the new one, 320GB, is exactly the same as the old one,120gb....when i replace the 320gb into my laptop....i want to boot up exactly the same as my old 120GB HDD? everything including the OS and partition, partitions with all my data in it. [Problem] My laptop have only one SATA slots for my HDD, and i am planning to use USB to clone the drive, it means......120GB (SATA)-----Clone_to-------->USB 320GB portable.....after that, replace the 320gb with the 120, and boot up..... so.....what software? and how? :( TQ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted December 16, 2008 Share Posted December 16, 2008 You can use anything like imagex (part of Windows Automated Installation Kit), achronis or ghost to do this, but a cheap way would be to boot linux and use the dd tool, ie dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb (where sda = 120GB and sdb = 320GB). Will take hours but its a bit for bit copy of the entire drive. Let it run, swap the 300 with the 120, boot, and create a 2nd partition with the extra space you have on the 320. note: fuck this up and you will loose the 120GB's contents, do a couple of dry runs first and make damn sure you know which drive is which. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
X3N Posted December 16, 2008 Share Posted December 16, 2008 there alot of options for this... in the open source area you have clonezilla which is a clone of ghost theres also dd which is my fave... none opensource stuff that ive used is ghost which works well. also acronis true image really though the best is dd if you learn how to use that because it does a bit for bit exact copy... alot of these other programs compress the freespace which speeds up the process and makes the image smaller but if you want an exact copy then you should use dd. Ive had unpredictable things happen with the mbr when using tools other then dd. Plus dd works over netcat nicely in case you wanted to do it over the network. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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