Re: [g4u-help] FAQ: Bogus info about Windows and NTFS support

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:06:31 -0700

Well you are wrong. I've cloned, and booted to the cloned versions, of NTFS systems (Windows XP et al) so many times that I know it works. I don't need to use purchased software to do my cloning. I can confidently clone any NTFS system from an existing hard drive, to a larger hard drive, swap the drives, and boot to that larger drive without the slightest problem. I've also cloned Linux systems and those too boot just fine. The trick is to make sure that the cloned drive is at least as big or bigger (in actual bytes) than the source drive.

You can also clone any NTFS filesystem which has been created as a virtual machine, as in VMWare. You just copy the virual machine from disk A to disk B, all you need is enough space. You may have to do a bit of fine tuning and debugging but it works. when run under VMware.

Bob Cochran



David Balazic wrote:
Hi!
 

5.1 Supported filesystems

One of the questions arising a lot is "what filesystems does g4u support". The answer is: "all of them". g4u reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0 to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data stored in these partitions.

For NTFS and Windows, this contradicts itself ;-)
 
Problem 1 :
If you copy a ntfs partition to another partition (let say on the same disk) bit by bit, it wont work (at all, or will report errors; in Windows).
Namely, ntfs stores some data related to its position on the disk. After days of debugging this problem, I found a web site explaining the background and also how to fix it. Unfortunately, I don't remember the address of that site. Basically, the start postion of the partition must be stored somewhere in the ntfs system data sectors, expressed as bytes from the beginning of the disk (warning, writing from memory).
 
Problem 2:
If you clone bit by bit a disk to another and it contains Windows, the clone will probably not work (fail right in the boot loader). This is again, because the Windows boot system has a dependency on certain crap that you surely know, called "geometry". Which can be different for different disks. In this moment, I have no idea how to fix this.

I believe this info would clear up a few things for users cloning Windows related disks and/or partitions.
 
Regards,
David
 
PS: I would be great if you propagate this info to other implementors of free disk cloning programs, so they can inform they users. (and by that reduce traffix on their mailing lists; this of course should hold also for this list)

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