Quickest way to clone drives
I have some old servers to migrate to new hard disks (all running Windows Server). They have two SATA drives installed (and no spare capacity). I plan on connecting two new drives on USB/SATA adapters, and booting to a Linux Live CD to copy the data. The drives are 80GB drives, about 50% utilised, NTFS partitions. Which is the quickest software method to duplicate the disks? I'm looking for the shorted downtime I can get away with. I can look at commercial offerings if necessary (although they all want extra for copying server disks and I don't really need a pretty GUI). Obviously I'm looking for something which copies the structure and the data without copying all the blank space, so I assume that means it needs to understand NTFS. (It also needs to make the new disks bootable etc if the one being cloned was.) Will it be significantly quicker to take one drive out and clone from one SATA port to another, then swap the drives around to clone the other disk? Bear in mind I would then be doing the two disks serially (and there'd be a few extra minutes of shutting the server down and swapping disks around as well). I could possibly clone one of hard disks using my laptop but that would be USB-USB and I can't see that being anything other than slow. I know that I could do this all with dd but (I assume) it'll be relatively slow due to all the blank disk space being copied. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
Mark, I have used Symantec Ghost Solution Suite in the past to do exactly this to great effect - usually in conjunction with BartPE, you only require two or three files from Ghost and can use your existing window$ drivers for storage controllers. License and media for a single machine was just shy of £30 a couple of years ago IIRC, and if you are looking to purchase for 5 machines or more, additional licenses can be had for between £5 and £10. My attempts at using partimage and g4u amongst others have been mixed, but in all cases I have found these were vastly more time consuming than the £30 cost of Ghost. I'd love to hear of some FOSS that works at a comparable speed, however, so eager to hear others' experiences. Jim ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Rogers" <mark@quarella.co.uk> To: "ALUG - mailing list" <main@lists.alug.org.uk> Sent: Monday, 12 July, 2010 1:41:46 PM Subject: [ALUG] Quickest way to clone drives I have some old servers to migrate to new hard disks (all running Windows Server). They have two SATA drives installed (and no spare capacity). I plan on connecting two new drives on USB/SATA adapters, and booting to a Linux Live CD to copy the data. The drives are 80GB drives, about 50% utilised, NTFS partitions. Which is the quickest software method to duplicate the disks? I'm looking for the shorted downtime I can get away with. I can look at commercial offerings if necessary (although they all want extra for copying server disks and I don't really need a pretty GUI). Obviously I'm looking for something which copies the structure and the data without copying all the blank space, so I assume that means it needs to understand NTFS. (It also needs to make the new disks bootable etc if the one being cloned was.) Will it be significantly quicker to take one drive out and clone from one SATA port to another, then swap the drives around to clone the other disk? Bear in mind I would then be doing the two disks serially (and there'd be a few extra minutes of shutting the server down and swapping disks around as well). I could possibly clone one of hard disks using my laptop but that would be USB-USB and I can't see that being anything other than slow. I know that I could do this all with dd but (I assume) it'll be relatively slow due to all the blank disk space being copied. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG _______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On 12/07/10 15:57, Jim Rippon wrote:
My attempts at using partimage and g4u amongst others have been mixed, but in all cases I have found these were vastly more time consuming than the £30 cost of Ghost.
One of the problems with commercial offerings tends to be that the prices scale depending on usage, and for server O/S they seem to charge more. I looked at Ghost but it only says it supports XP/Vista (not even W7!). I would assume that if I run it from a boot CD then a disk is a disk is a disk, but knowing my luck I'll start it up and it'll detect a Windows Server install and tell me I need a different version. This is one of my biggest gripes with commercial software! Also, I didn't say this originally but I have 15 different servers I need to do this with, and I wouldn't be surprised if I needed a new licence for each server? It looks like dd will be the most reliable but slow, ntfsclone faster but won't handle the partitioning, so ideally a tool which combines the two will do what I need. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
On 12 July 2010 16:45, Mark Rogers <mark@quarella.co.uk> wrote:
On 12/07/10 15:57, Jim Rippon wrote:
My attempts at using partimage and g4u amongst others have been mixed, but in all cases I have found these were vastly more time consuming than the £30 cost of Ghost.
One of the problems with commercial offerings tends to be that the prices scale depending on usage, and for server O/S they seem to charge more. I looked at Ghost but it only says it supports XP/Vista (not even W7!).
I would assume that if I run it from a boot CD then a disk is a disk is a disk, but knowing my luck I'll start it up and it'll detect a Windows Server install and tell me I need a different version. This is one of my biggest gripes with commercial software! Also, I didn't say this originally but I have 15 different servers I need to do this with, and I wouldn't be surprised if I needed a new licence for each server?
It looks like dd will be the most reliable but slow, ntfsclone faster but won't handle the partitioning, so ideally a tool which combines the two will do what I need.
Mark, With my latest laptop, I used the bootable GParted Live CD to backup and delete one of the recovery partitions, then resized the existing ones to make room for a linux partition, before restoring the original recovery partition. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php I haven't used it, but you could alse take a look at Parted Magic: http://partedmagic.com/ HTH, Peter.
On 12/07/10 16:45, Mark Rogers wrote:
It looks like dd will be the most reliable but slow, ntfsclone faster but won't handle the partitioning, so ideally a tool which combines the two will do what I need.
I presume these two disks aren't configured as Dynamic Disks, as that is going to give you problems even with the commercial offerings. NTFSclone will be a lot faster than a direct image clone but a direct disk to disk clone is troublesome with ntfsclone, it doesn't clone the partition map or the MBR etc and it doesn't natively support resizing on the fly (you'd have to apply nftsresize to the image nftsclone makes before writing a new partition map to the new disk) then you would have to grab the MBR etc with dd and shove it on as well. By the time you have cloned from original to image and then from image to new and messed about with MBR's and partition maps you may as well do it the slow way with dd and then resize with gparted or something. SATA to SATA and 80GB isn't going to take that long. Another way would be using Parted Magic http://partedmagic.com/ , it's also available on the latest version of the UBCD. Unlike Jim I have found G4L quite useful but I think it lacks the tools you need to resize, Parted Magic is probably better in almost all circumstances now. Also be aware on Vista at least I have had issues where after resizing an NFTS volume, It wouldn't appear as the correct size in Windows despite being ok in recovery console and from Linux. I think I had to use a very new version of gparted to change the volume size a bit again before the new size registered.
On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 18:39 +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
NTFSclone will be a lot faster than a direct image clone but a direct disk to disk clone is troublesome with ntfsclone, it doesn't clone the partition map or the MBR etc and it doesn't natively support resizing on the fly (you'd have to apply nftsresize to the image nftsclone makes before writing a new partition map to the new disk) then you would have to grab the MBR etc with dd and shove it on as well. By the time you have cloned from original to image and then from image to new and messed about with MBR's and partition maps you may as well do it the slow way with dd and then resize with gparted or something.
You can copy the MBR/partition map and the boot record of the first partition by copying the first two cyclinders with dd and then use ntfsclone for the rest of the partition. Regards, Steve.
participants (5)
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Jim Rippon -
Mark Rogers -
samwise -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood