Copying one HD to another

[Uranium-235]

I'm probably going to be getting a brand new hard drive. I need to copy EVERYTHING including the boot app to the new HD. Basically, I need to be able to copy everything over, and have it work exacly as the previous one did before. Filesystem is NTFS, OS is windows 2000 SP4. Anyone have any idea what programs that can do this?

[Tyler]

I've never done it myself, but I know of Powerquest DriveCopy, Norton Ghost, and Drive2Drive.

[Jason425]

doing that sort of thing over software is a big pain...and if you mess up, you're in BIG trouble...

just be REAL careful...

i know for linux, but not windows. maybe this will work in cygwin. (if there is a linux live cd that will do NTFS writing properly, just use it, not sure that exists though)

find /current/drive/mnt/point -xdev -print0 | cpio -pa0V /new/drive/mount/point

do that for each partition, throw in the new harddrive, and you'll be good to go. You'll need to create new partitions first, and they'll need to be big enough to cover (obviously).

edit: hmm, i'm not sure this will work with windows as you'd need to install a bootloader and i doubt this process will cover that. you might be able to dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc (hda=old drive hdc=new drive) not sure though.