So Western Digital agreed it seems my hard drive is faulty and under warranty due to a very occasional, intermittent fault I’ve been having with it for a long time. My advance replacement was waiting here for me at work today (need to get this done and faulty unit sent back under RMA asap so I’m not charged for the new drive.)
So my current drive have three partitions.
hda0 - WinXP
hda1 - Ubuntu Studio
hda2 - Data
hda2 I will copy to an external for safety before doing anything else.
Not too bothered with my Ubuntu Studio partition, had a few niggles and though if I was going to tackle it again I would probably reinstall from scratch (most likely Ubuntu LTS version.)
Now part of me would like to keep my XP, if it’s easy. Is there a way to ghost the whole drive, or even just a partition, onto the new disk? Which is an identical model, hopefully making it easier.
If not and I’m going to have to install from the ground up anyway should I just bite the bullet and finally go Win7-64? I know XP well, how to configure it, what programs I like to use with it and what works well. But my computer will handle Win7 fine and am starting to feel like I’m hanging onto the past a bit…
Thanks for any words of wisdom you people can give me
Yes, using Acronis True Image. Assuming the new HD is the same? I mean the size, kind doesn’t matter. I don’t really remember if selecting a separate partion is in the features, but it does it’s thing well and fast (relatively. My 80 GB HD to 160 HD upgrade was done overnight.)
Get the demo version. Its 30 days and absolutely enough for one run.
Warping to Windows 7 is a good choice, its much easier and better than to Vista. Just probably you will have to reinstall all the drivers. The good thing is (again, not like in Vista) is that you can try using your XP drivers.
You could try Easeus todo backup
It’s free and also supports disk-cloning.
I guess it also supports Linux partitioning since this tool was advised by Hak5.org and these folks work with linux all the time.
Only mentions Windows but I’m going to give this one a try. Partly as I recommend the name from when people I know have wanted to recover data, partly as it’s not a Trial.
As I said I’ll store all my data safe anyway. Really need to get in the habit of properly backing up!
I noticed. Only Disk Copy mentions “All operating systems”, perhaps that is what you are looking for.
When looking at the download link, the screenshot looks like it is a bootable CD ISO
Used Easus. Clone disk, sector by sector ticked. Seems to have worked perfectly. Windows is there, Grub loads at boot but haven’t yet tried to actually get into Ubuntu. Took me a little while to see the right option as I think the more obvious one wanted to make an image of the disk, rather than actually clone it. Good work and thanks you guys.
