In practice: g4u cloning

Very slow: hours... this was in a 100mb fdx switched environment. Basic premise: get an FTP server that can hold an image as big as your drive. Don't use IIS (at least on Win2k pro) it died after 4GB was uploaded (yes, it was an NTFS partition; this wasn't a fat16/32 file size limit problem, it was an IIS problem). I ended up using the free Quick 'n Easy FTP server lite.

BTW: www.webattack.com aka www.snapfiles.com has lots of great freeware / shareware utilities that have helped me over the years. If I'm looking for an app or utility free to use (and when aren't I?), the first place I look is webattack.com.

Anyway, after the FTP server is setup (setup a user named 'install' and give him a password), then boot the PC you want cloned/imaged with the g4u CD. Follow the instructions on the screen. I did this to move from a 40gb drive in my laptop to a 80gb drive. Once the uploaddisk/slurpdisk (g4u terminology for dump disk / load disk) is complete I was able to use my new 80gb drive.

But wait; it copied the configuration over identically. That means all my partitions are still the size they used to be on the 40gb drive. Solution: enter ntfsresize - or the QTparted front end, available on many linux distros. Here's some info: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

I opted to use the RIP distro: http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/ after booting, I followed the instructions from the RIP homepage to backup the mbr and partition table. I then ran fdisk, deleted my partitions, recreated a new 80gb partition that consumed the entire drive size, changed the type to 7 (ntfs) and set it to be bootable ('a' command). After writing ('w') it to disk, I ran the ntfsresize /dev/hda1 to resize the partition to occupy the entire disk. To confirm the resize was successful, I ran ntfsresize --info --force /dev/hda1. Remeber that just because I used fdisk to delete the partition, that doesn't delete the phyisical partition, it just deletes the entry for the partition in the partition table. That part is not that destructive because your can recover from it (if you know what the hell you're doing!).

Lastly for me, since I was doing dual-boot with XP and Fedora and had grub installed on the mrb, I had to fix that since I'm stupid when it comes to grub. I booted with the XP cd, selected R for repair, which booted me into recovery console. From there I did a 'fixmbr' command to kill grub and get the XP boot loader installed. see the description of the XP recover console: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314058

confused? See the following: http://homepage.smc.edu/morgan_david/cs40/assignments/assgt4.htm
http://homepage.smc.edu/morgan_david/cs40/partitionrec.htm
http://www.ntfs.com/boot-sector-damaged.htm general good source of NTFS info: www.ntfs.com