[geeks] Windows: move to new hard drive (forgive me)

[Dan Duncan]

On 12/10/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Situation:
>
> Windows XP on 40GB hard drive.
>
> Desired situation:
>
> Windows XP on 160GB hard drive.
>
> What's the easiest way to just move the whole thing to the new drive?
>
> Will something like Acronis True Image do it?

You can boot your favorite linux cd and use dd to do it.  The MBR is
the first 512 bytes of the drive.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc count=1 bs=512

This will also copy over the partition table which will NOT be valid
because the block size for the larger drive won't be the same so
you'll need to run fdisk on the new drive, delete all the partitions,
and then create new ones of whatever size you want.

You can copy the partitions across whole (dd if=/dev/hda1 of=dev/hdc1)
or mount them and copy the files or if you use the debian install cd
you can actually resize NTFS partitions.