2

I have a dying hard drive and a replacement drive (same model). What is the best way to copy the old drive to the new drive?

Its a dual boot setup - Ubuntu Karmic and Windows XP.

I really don't want to have to reinstall both operating systems and all their software.

srboisvert
  • 139

2 Answers2

6

Use a backup solution which can do bare metal bit-for-bit backups of the entire disk. Clonezilla is fully capable of this and would be my first choice.

5

If you can plug your new HDD in alongside the old one, you should be able to clone all the partitions from within Ubuntu using dd. Although the article doesn't mention it, the technique should work for any type of partition as it's doing a raw data copy

robertc
  • 749