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New ntfsclone to clone to smaller disk. Should I worry?
I need to clone a laptop hard drive to a Crucial M4 SSD. The source drive is a 750 GB Seagate Hybrid drive, the target drive is a 512 GB M4. The source drive was not fully partitioned, and I shrank the Win7 NTFS partition so that it (and 2 other tiny partitions at the start of the disk) would fit on the target drive.

I initially tried using Apricorn's "Easy GigIV" that came with an upgrade kit that I purchased with a USB/SATA adapter purchased with a 256 GB M4 earlier. It seemed to be working fine (and did work fine before when going from smaller to larger), but failed here with the smaller target disk.

I then tried using ddrescue on a SysRescCD to copy sda to sdb (not knowing how it would react to the target being smaller), but it failed when it ran out of space.

I then tried "ddrescue -vr3 -b 1024 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1" - that seemed fine.

Then "ddrescue -vr3 -b 1024 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2" - seemed fine.

But "ddrescue -vr3 -b 1024 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3" failed saying it was out of space.

That's when I shrank the NTFS partition to be sure there would be enough space.

So, now I'm using ntfsclone on a Clonezilla CD. It explicitly asked about installing Grub and shrinking partitions as necessary. The first two partitions copied fine.

I started cloning the 3rd (~ 480 GB NTFS) partition last night. ~ 10 hours later there was still no progress indicated and no flashing of the hard drive light.

I just restarted it, and told it to be Verbose this time. (It's a full-screen text mode application.)

"Cloning the /dev/sda3 to /dev/sdb3...
Clean filesystem hearder [sic] in device /dev/sdb3...
Using ntfsclone to clone...
Checking NTFS integrity in /dev/sda3... done!
ntfsclone v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
_"

It doesn't seem any more verbose this time. :-(

The cursor stays flashing at that last line with no other progress indication. No flashing of the hard drive light is visible (it was visible earlier).

Should I assume that it is working and that it will just take a long time?

Any idea how long I should wait?

Is there a favorite tool in your toolkit to clone NTFS partitions that gracefully handles smaller target drives?

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.
New It seems to be doing something. The fan is running fast...
New Bah. I hate Windows.
It wasn't doing anything. Apparently it was hanging due to a dirty flag issue with the NTFS partition.

Ubuntu on my P7120 laptop can see the Windows 7 NTFS partition just fine.

I downloaded the latest Clonezilla live CD. It craps out when I tell it to clone the Win7 partition, complaining that it is dirty and CHKDSK needs to be run.

Winders can't see it - it thinks the partition is empty. So, the Windows cloning utility I have won't copy it (no drive letter). So, I can't run Winders CHKDSK on it. And I obviously can't boot the original drive any more (since Winders can't see it).

As a nearly-last resort, I booted the Win7 install DVD and went through the Repair options including /NewMBR, etc. It trundles a long time, rebooted once, but didn't fix anything (it continues to try to boot up the Repair stub). It didn't seem to break anything (thankfully).

Booting SysRescCD and running GParted shows the NTFS partition fine. If I tell it to run Chkdsk it trundles a while then says things are Ok.

Trying ddrescue again at the moment. 20 MB/s, trundle, trundle.

If it works, there's still the issue of getting Winders to recognize the partition again. :-/ If it doesn't, I'm not sure what else to do.

Grrr....

I don't want to reinstall Winders because I don't have all of the source disks for the software on the laptop (I inherited it at work from someone who left). And if I did reinstall, I'd want to go to Win7 64-bit (it has 32-bit now) and I'm not sure how one would copy stuff over without reinstalling it.

Grr...

Wish me luck.

Cheers,
Scott.
(No, Greg, Linux on this work machine isn't an option.)
New Re: Bah. I hate Windows.
AS Wrote:
(No, Greg, Linux on this work machine isn't an option.)
So says you...

All of this vacuous playing with Windows is exactly why I use it in a VM, anymore. That is *IF* I use Windows at all.

Sorry Dude... I'll take Linux (or even FreeBSD (even with the Security breach)) over Windows *any* day. You can continue to waste hours/days/months/time itself or you can choose to get work done.

In General, use Windows on bare metal if you don't quite care if you will be able to get things done. I won't anymore... not even on an Intel Mac.
--
greg@gregfolkert.net
PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
New Clonezilla? *DUH*
http://clonezilla.org/

Seems to work just like and exactly as well as Norton Ghost.

Norton Ghost does the "image to smaller" disks as long as there is not to much data.

Just makes sure your source disks are in good shape according to Windows.
--
greg@gregfolkert.net
PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Expand Edited by folkert Jan. 1, 2013, 12:36:43 PM EST
New Don't assume Win7 is like XP when it comes to partitioning.
So, of course, I had to reinstall. :-(

Win7 boots by having a separate partition with the boot loader, etc. Something apparently got mangled along the way during my partition shrinking and dd adventures, and Win7 refused to boot no matter what I did.

Linux saw the contents of the partition just fine, but Win7 would show the OS partition as being blank. I spent a few hours with pointers from Terabyte Unlimited's web page, messed around with BootItBM (a very nice tool) on a bootable USB stick, and ran the Win7 repair from the original Dell install DVD, but nothing worked. BootItBM said to run scandisk or chkdsk /f from Winders.... :-/

So, I finally punted and installed the M4 in the laptop and installed Win7 on the 450+GB partition.

It went fine. Took forever though (including 135 updates of the OS).

I had 28 GB unpartitioned at the end of the M4 disk, so tonight I installed Linux Mint 13 (LTS) Xfce 64-bit on it. There were a couple of minor glitches, but it installed fine. It's a very nice, clean, distribution.

And of course, it sees the NTFS partition on the original 750GB drive in the USB interface just fine.

So, I'm copying stuff over from the old NTFS partition via a USB interface onto the M4 while Mint is booted. Tomorrow I will reinstall the Winders software I use most, and worry about the other stuff later.

I think I'll check at work to see if they'd be upset if I used Mint as my OS and ran Win7 in a VM. This Winders stuff is a nightmare that continues to get worse... :-/ (You can party now, Greg. ;-)

I hope this helps someone else out there.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Twas only a SMONYTDAYLTBWW
Simple Matter Of Nagging You To Death And You Losing The Battle With Windows.

*I WIN*...

Neener, neener!

I sure wish you hadn't gone through all the stuff I went through which led me to abandon Windows, oh so long ago.

edit:
AS, I Hope you didn't take this wrong... it sucks you had to go through all this. You've taken the first step... I'm happy about that, though!
--
greg@gregfolkert.net
PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Expand Edited by folkert Jan. 2, 2013, 11:23:11 PM EST
New Been there, done that, burned the book
M's Win7 laptop is pure Win7, and will be forever.
It's not fast enough to do Win in a VM, and I gave up on the dual boot after 3 reinstalls. MS wins, it owns that hardware.
fuckers.
New I didn't have this trouble earlier.
I replaced the ~ 250 GB original disk with a 640 GB Samsung (that started dying a few months later) and a 750 GB Seagate hybrid without incident. In each case, ddrescue or similar was able to clone the installation and I could enlarge the partitions with Gparted without memorable problems.

What apparently killed it this time was shrinking the Win 7 partition to get it to fit on the 512 GB M4. Enlarging the partition was not an issue - shrinking was.

:-/

Since SSDs larger than ~ 500 GB are much more expensive, keeping Win7 partitions safely under that size probably makes sense for the foreseeable future.

Linux Mint and Win7 are playing together pretty nicely so far (separate partitions).

Another gotcha I noticed in the docs for BootItBM is that Win8 apparently will trash the partitions it sets up if FastBoot is turned on. Joy. And there are even more issues if you use UEFI/GPT etc., etc. as the Win8 machines apparently do... E.g. http://www.terabyteu...pic.php?f=2&t=877

It's getting to the point, where [it's] no fun anymore...

Cheers,
Scott.
New It hasn't been fun for years
I'm pretty sure that says more about me than the state of tech, but I wouldn't bet on it.
--

Drew
     ntfsclone to clone to smaller disk. Should I worry? - (Another Scott) - (9)
         It seems to be doing something. The fan is running fast... -NT - (Another Scott) - (2)
             Bah. I hate Windows. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                 Re: Bah. I hate Windows. - (folkert)
         Clonezilla? *DUH* - (folkert)
         Don't assume Win7 is like XP when it comes to partitioning. - (Another Scott) - (4)
             Twas only a SMONYTDAYLTBWW - (folkert)
             Been there, done that, burned the book - (crazy) - (2)
                 I didn't have this trouble earlier. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                     It hasn't been fun for years - (drook)

Mere flesh wound. Have at you!
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