Best way to copy a hard drive

[rampantandroid]

Hi all,

Just grabbed a new backup/data drive for my system, and I'd like to copy my OLD backup drive over - hidden files and all...is there a more efficient way than drag/drop that'll automatically do it without all of the "do you want to merge" prompts windows hits you with?

Thanks!
RA

 

[/dev/null]

Hi all,

Just grabbed a new backup/data drive for my system, and I'd like to copy my OLD backup drive over - hidden files and all...is there a more efficient way than drag/drop that'll automatically do it without all of the "do you want to merge" prompts windows hits you with?

Thanks!
RA

dd. live it, learn it, love it

 

[rampantandroid]

dd. live it, learn it, love it

Preferrable no unix or linux involed My days of messing with linux are long gone. emerge -uDn ended it, I think...

 

[MrsOldMX]

robocopy.exe should do the trick

 

[rampantandroid]

robocopy.exe should do the trick

I suspected that might the answer...OK, I'll go figure out the command line options for it again

Thanks!

 

[/usr/home]

Something like TeraCopy would work well.

 

[Lord Nassirbannipal]

Or plain old:

xcopy e: f: /e /h /y

 

[SirMaster]

rsync!

 

[XOR != OR]

Preferrable no unix or linux involed My days of messing with linux are long gone. emerge -uDn ended it, I think...

ouch. You could always grab a live cd, boot it, dd from your src to your target, reboot, throw away the CD and pretend it ever happened.

I'm just sayin' you've got options.

 

[Surly73]

I just did this on the weekend and I used Clonezilla in partition-to-partition mode.

It will resize the target filesystem and it will be absolutely certain to copy all permissions, special flags, hardlinks, symlinks, junction points, whatever without a problem. The downside is that depending on how you do things the partion UUID could be the same and you shouldn't let the OS see the old and new partitions at the same time if it can be avoided. Win7 handles it pretty gracefully, XP has more issues.

I've been using robocopy to sync archives. I've found that it can get cranky and stuck on things like the recycle bin, System Volume Information and other attributes. It will stop dead with 30 second pauses between attempts if it gets permission denied. Since you have to execute it as a regular user (even if elevated) you still might not have permission to robocopy absolutely everything depending on how complicated your install/environment is.

That's why I chose cloning.