From: Matt Smollinger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Like I mentioned in my original post, copying partitions that are NTFS is
> troublesome
> and known not to work. This is a problem with the FS and not g4u.
Of course. But how many users go and research deep details of the fs they will
copy ?
(note that I found forum posts about this issue because I already know about
it. You
think someone will go study the ntfs boot sectors before doing a partition
copy?)
The most research a casual user would do is read the g4u docs and FAQ. And
there is says:
ntfs is supported
Why would he think this is not true and go for further research ?
> Also, like I said
> before, researching the filesystem you're intending upon imaging is always
> recommended
> before any kind of image is made.
>
> I think we need to understand here that we are doing a copy from one NTFS
> partition to
> another on the SAME drive. We are not speaking about drive geometry in
> general.... It's
> PARITION location on the drive. This is important to note, because as Dave
> correctly pointed
> out in a post from Anton, windows needs to know where data resides on the
> drive.
>
> So silly question, why, if you have a working, bootable copy of windows, why
> would
> you be copying data using something other than windows from one partition to
> another?
Because windows does not come with a partition copy tool ? ;-)
>
> As for cloning from a 20 -> 250 and it has issues, can you post what your
> Sector/Head
> information is for both drives? You may or may not be able to get it off the
> labels. If not,
> there are ways to get it from inside the OS.
I had this problem last year. Also solved it last year. (by using a commercial
cloning tool
that fixes this "unimportant" issues automatically)
Regards,
David
PS: Sorry if you see any silly text formatting, done by outlook ...
________________________________
From: David Balazic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:34:22 +0200
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED];>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Conversation: [g4u-help] FAQ: Bogus info about Windows and NTFS support
Subject: Re: [g4u-help] FAQ: Bogus info about Windows and NTFS support
Hi!
The first (and partly the second) issue is described here by Anton Altaparmakov
(_THE_ ntfs guru) here :
http://forum.linux-ntfs.org/viewtopic.php?p=545
and here:
http://forum.linux-ntfs.org/viewtopic.php?t=76
(I could not find the web page I mentioned in my first post).
Also it can be easily checked by anyone:
have a Windows system like this:
hda1 - windows boot&system
hda2 - ntfs data partition
hda3 - ntfs empty partition
copy hda2 to hda3 (cp, cat, m4u, as you like)
boot windows, see it complaining about hda3 not being good.
Second issue:
Clone a windows disk to another.
With _different_ geometry (that is sector and head count).
Try to boot it.
Again, this happens if the disks have different geometry.
Maybe you can simulate this in VMware with having one IDE and one SCSI disk.
To conclude, those are documented facts*. That users encounter in practice.
You can of course ignore it.
I rest my case.
Regards,
David
* - I did not provide references for docs about the second issue, but the the
web is full of docs describing how boot loaders and NTLDR works
________________________________
From: Robert L Cochran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Mon 24-Sep-07 00:11
To: David Balazic
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [g4u-help] FAQ: Bogus info about Windows and NTFS support
Matt Smollinger just replied to this with greater precision than me. I
use the 'copydisk' command exclusively because that is what I want to
do, clone an entire disk to another disk. I don't copy partitions. So I
stand corrected on that (thanks Matt!)
Bob
Robert L Cochran wrote:
> 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!
>>
>> At http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#filesystems it says :
>>
>> 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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