copy from one drive to the other without ghosting software

[.:front2back:.]

Howdy..

K so I have 2 hard drives, and I want to copy the entire boot volume to another hard drive, through a command prompt.
Disk 1=Win2000
Disk 2=Hard drive i want to copy to..

I have no ghosting software or optical drives either. I was thinking of booting with win98se boot floppy {On disk 2} to get to a command prompt, then typing some command to copy across.

Or is there a way to do it in Windows? (I'm hoping that there is).

Any help?

front2back

[SirDice]

Try booting with a linux live-cd and use the dd command..

[.:front2back:.]

Howdy.

Thanks sirdice, it seems to be copying something, what it's copying i don't know, will find out when it's done.

cheers
f2b

[Nokia]

Lol!


You can use the "diskpart" coomand from the cmd prompt mate to copy simple boot volumes.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d....mspx?mfr=true

Works a treat for me!

[SirDice]

If you use it as something like dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 it'll copy hda1 (first partition on the first disk) byte for byte to the other disk.. So it'll include everything..

AFAIK there's no DOS command to copy a full disk apart from diskcopy.com but IIRC diskcopy can only copy floppies.. You might be able to copy every file with XCOPY (plus some switches like /E /T and /H) but I doubt you would be able to properly boot from it.. Also Win98 cannot read an NTFS volume.. If you used something like ntfs4dos then all your ACLs will get lost in the process..

Edit: Shoot.. Nokia: If I read that MS article correctly, you're basicly creating a RAID1 (mirror) then breaking it?

[Nokia]

"diskpart" and then "add disk=*" from the command prompt can mirror one partion to another on a different HDD.

[SirDice]

Originally posted here by Nokia
"diskpart" and then "add disk=*" from the command prompt can mirror one partion to another on a different HDD.

If I read it correctly it'll mirror a (simple) volume not a partition.

n : Specifies the disk to contain the mirror You can mirror only simple volumes. The specified disk must have unallocated space at least as large as the size of the simple volume you want to mirror.

There's a slight difference between the two: Differences between volume and partition.

[Nokia]

I see what you are saying Sirdice, but NT based O/S's have more that one root directory - Hence Windows will assign at least one path to each mounted volume, I.E C:/, D:/, E:/ etc


You give focus to a partition on the selected disk.

When a partition has focus, the related volume(s) also have focus.
Or
When the volume has focus, the related disk and partition also have focus if the volume maps to a single specific partition.

In other words if you give focus to the volume on a partition by default the partition had focus too, so you also copy the partition over.


//Can I have a pound for everytime I used the word focus please

[House929]

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/hdclonefree.html << freeware

you could also do ufsdump /ufsrestore

[.:front2back:.]

Howdy..

Thanks everyone for the help. I got the job done eventually after 3 attempts..

So i guess it's greenies for everyone.

cheers
f2b