[PVRCNC] Laptop hard drive question

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Brian Alsop wrote:

> I was hoping somebody out there has already done this.
>
> Looking for an easy way to clone the contents of a laptop hard drive to a 
> larger laptop drive.


>From you posting I think you have two problems

o how to plug in your source and target drives

o how to copy the disk

I backup and copy laptop hard drives all the time (it's the 
only way to copy windows afaik). I bought an adapter that 
allows you to plug the 2.5" drive into a 3.5" IDE cable 
(5-10$) (be carefull - the adapter is symmetrical and you 
can plug the laptop drive in upside down, which causes the 
adapter to loose magic smoke, but the drive survives - check 
that the pin numbers are right, then mark the adapter with 
marker pen opposite the missing pin on the laptop drive). An 
IDE cable in a regular desktop is not hot plug-able, so you 
have to power off your machine for the plugging. So I have 
an external USB drive (for 3.5" drives), which is hot 
pluggable.

To copy the drives I just use dd (standard in Linux, also 
available with cygwin in windows). To expand the partition 
for the bigger target drive after the copy, I use partition 
magic

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!