Cloning the first partition of wd0 to a further partition on wd0

puhaTek

Hi. I've got Windows XP installed on the first partition of my old laptop and I would like to clone it and move it to the end of the HDD so I can try to install OpenSTEP at the beginning of the HDD because of the 8GB limit.

How would I go about using disklabel(8) and fdisk(8) to copy it to a later partition on the HDD? Current output from # disklabel wd0

# /dev/rwd0d:
type: unknown
disk: NetBSD
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 116280
total sectors: 117210240
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0 #microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0 #microseconds
drivedata: 0

16 partitions:
# size, offset, fstype, [fsize, bsize, cpg/sgs]
a: 6110496, 109455270, 4.2BSD, [2048, 16384, 0] # (cyl. 108586*- 114648*)
b: 1050069, 115565766, swap,  # (cyl. 114648*- 115690*)
c: 7160565, 109455270, unused, [0, 0, ] (cyl. 0 - 116279)
d: 117210240, 0, unused, [ 0, 0, ] (cyl. 0 - 116279)
e: 31455207, 63, NTFS, [ ] # (Cyl. 0* - 31205*)
i: 20964762, 31455333, NTFS, [] # (Cyl. 31205*- 52004*)

thanks

puhaTek

I'll try Clonezilla instead, I thought it might just be easier to use dd(8) to write the image to a different partition instead.

rvp

puhaTek I thought it might just be easier to use dd(8) to write the image to a different partition instead.

You can't use dd here, mate. If there are absolute sector locs. in the FS meta-data, those'll get copied over, and they'll all be wrong now in the copied image.

The standard way to do this is to:
a) create a new FS
b) mount old and new FSes
c) use tar to copy files from old to new: tar -C /old/FS -cf - . | tar -C /new/FS -xvpf -

This would've been trivial if the FS were VFAT as NetBSD has RW support, but, with NTFS I don't know...Maybe ntfs-3g from pkgsrc can handle it? Note sure also if tar will be able to handle all file-types present on that NTFS partition. (For example, even on Unix, it skips socket files.)

puhaTek

rvp Thanks rvp, when you explain it that way it makes a lot more sense.

Mosfet

For cloning NTFS partitions, I always use ntfsclone (which is part of the ntfs-3g package). See: https://linux.die.net/man/8/ntfsclone

rvp

Mosfet The man-page also warns:

Windows Cloning

If you want to copy, move or restore a system or boot partition to another computer, or to a different disk or partition (e.g. hda1->hda2, hda1->hdb1 or to a different disk sector offset) then you will need to take extra care.

Usually, Windows will not be able to boot, unless you copy, move or restore NTFS to the same partition which starts at the same sector on the same type of disk having the same BIOS legacy cylinder setting as the original partition and disk had.

puhaTek

Mosfet
Thanks Mosfet. Are you the French Mosfet who used to hang in #bluebox back in the day?

I still haven't copied the partition. I've installed NetBSD 6 on the later partition but f**ked up my install because when i do disklabel wd0 it doesn't show all the partitions the same as fdisk wd0.

The Openstep and NeXTSTEP loaders seem to hang straight after the RAM test on my PIV, 3.06GHz with 512MB Ram :/ I know I could just use NetBSD with GNUSTEP but...

puhaTek

I ended up just dd ing the OpenSTEP image to the start of DELL laptop, obviously being a old OS (1996) it doesn't have drivers to support ICH4 which my hard drive uses and the fall back IDE compatibility mode doesn't work either.
Good news is that a old 32bit version of NetBSD works as expected with WIFI support 🙂 (I think I used the first version that was released with a bootable USB image).
Windows is gone as is the software used to burn cds, NERO.