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On the fly drive cloning

S

Stoly

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
6,706
I have to move a win XP install from a 160 to a 250 gb HDD

I have the main OS win7 drive and two drives 160 and 250 respectively. I want to clone the 160 to the 250.

Most of the time I image the drive and then restore it to the new one but I'd like to do it on the fly.
 
With the tools I'm aware of, you can't do it on the fly. Bit for bit copies don't like an active file system, you'd run into potential inconsistency issues that would mess things up real good.

Instead, you'd want to boot up into another OS, run some sort of cloning tool. When done, Windows will see a 160 partition, and you can use Windows disk manager to extend the volume to the full 250.
 
jojo69 said:
gParted live

clonezilla live
Click to expand...

Those are bootable linux environments on cd / flash drive that allow you to clone a drive/partition. They don't provide a way of cloning a running copy of windows, which AFAIK is not possible.

The only way I know to clone an active OS is on Solaris with ZFS where you can add a mirror to your root pool and then disconnect the old drive, while everything is running.
 
Old Hippie said:
That would be like replacing a car's engine while it's running.
Click to expand...

Pretty good analogy. Remember, the idea is to CLONE the drive, you know an EXACT copy. Pretty tough to do that while the drive being cloned is constantly being written to. While it is theoretically possible it would require updating the destination drive as the source changed in the areas that had already been copied until the cloning process was complete, very difficult and slow to to.
 
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heatlesssun said:
Pretty good analogy. Remember, the idea is to CLONE the drive, you know an EXACT copy. Pretty tough to do that while the drive being cloned is constantly being written to. While it is theoretically possible it would require updating the destination drive as the source changed until the cloning process was complete, very difficult and slow to to.
Click to expand...

Its neat that with ZFS it works. Kinda like magic.
 
heatlesssun said:
... Remember, the idea is to CLONE the drive, you know an EXACT copy. Pretty tough to do that while the drive being cloned is constantly being written to.
Click to expand...
Even **IF** you could clone it (dynamically), you would not (and should not) want to. Note that the state of the OS drive/filesystem (on disk), while running, is interdependent on many in-memory data structures, which will not be part of any cloning procedure.

--UhClem
 
I cloned a live RAID0 to a RAID 1 with O&O Diskimage. It worked so well I bought the server license for use in business.

It really is an awesome product. I got the server version for $79, if you look around on the net there's a 20% off coupon code floating around.

Download the demo, you'll love it
 
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