Backup to new Hard Drive

[Buchalka]

Hi,

I'm running Gentoo with a dual boot to Windows XP Pro for a few apps that I can't get working under Wine. I have 2 x 200GB ATA drives, but I want to migrate over to 2 x new 300GB SATA drives.

I'm assuming that SATA support is built into my kernel version (what do I need to achieve this, although it should not be that hard to figure out).
The real problem is how do I go about copying the data from the old drives to the new ones.

I upgraded a few years back and just manually created partitions and used rsync to copy all files and this worked very well for linux partitions, but now I've got a windows partition to consider as well.

I'm aware of utilities like Symantec's Ghost and Partition Magic, but don't really want to buy commercial software if I can help it, also as I wil be getting 50% more hard drive space, I want to resize the partitions at the same time.

Any suggestions for the best way to tackle this?

Thanks


Tim

[fangorn]

For the Linux partitions I use tar archives for backup. But rsync is similar. For Windows on NTFS you could use dd to copy the whole partition to the new disk. But Windows has some issues with disk geometry and partition size, so there is no way telling if a direct copied windows partition will work on a bigger drive (I would not bet on it). There are some tools for windows and linux (some free ones too), that claim to copy data from one partition to a bigger one even for ntfs, but I never tried one of those.

[bjd]

Remember that SATA drives are referenced as sdx, so you may have to alter fstab & grub/lilo before booting. SATA drivers are under "Device Drivers" in menuconfig, at work now so can't double check exactly where. Windows may have issues with drivers too, unless its changed recently SATA drivers aren't included as standard. That caught me out a few months ago when reinstalling Win2000 as my floppy drive was dead and Windows refused to look anywhere else for drivers.

Hope that helps