Copying a Hard Disk Containing Windows With Fedora

[Les Mikesell]

max bianco wrote:

> 
>      I need to copy the hard disk of a Windows computer to a new hard
>     disk of equal size. I was thinking of connecting both drives
>     (SATA/150), booting from the Fedora 8 Rescue Disk and then do
> 
>      dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
> 
>      in hope that after that, the second hard disk can be used in place
>     of the first one (including booting Windows, of course).
> 
>      Does this work? Thanks!
> 
> Does the fedora rescue disc support  reading and writing to ntfs?
> I would make sure it does or its all going to be a waste of time.

That doesn't matter with this approach.  You are copying raw disk 
sectors which will bring along whatever filesystem and boot sectors 
happen to reside on them.  What matters are that the disks have the same 
number of sectors and that the hardware where the system needs to boot 
is identical (if is a replacement disk for the same machine, that's 
obviously not an issue).

The disks are probably named sdX instead of hdX though.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com