[GRLUG] Question of how to copy 20 Gig HD to smaller HD?

[Rich Nagel]

Yeah, now I'm replying to my own post because I have something to add that I don't completely understand.

For some reason, I began to think that there might be some hidden boot block or something that might not get included in the partition copying, so I figured what the heck?!  Why not try out a crazy idea - nothing else has worked!  So what I did was I used the original Sight Seer CD to install Geexbox 1.0 onto the 4 gig hard drive, partitioning it to just 600 meg, and let it do the install.  Did a test boot - booted as expected(without the auto-play).  Then I took the hd out and slaved it to the 30 Gig hd in another system, ran the GPartEd util and copied the partition from the 30 Gig onto the 4 gig hd (WITHOUT first deleting the existing 600meg partition on the 4 gig hd).  Everything copied fine, and I put the 4 Gig hd in the IPAQ -- and viola! it's booting and running perfectly.  Question now is: why?!?  :/

Rich

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rich Nagel 
  To: grlug at grlug.org 
  Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 7:09 PM
  Subject: [GRLUG] Question of how to copy 20 Gig HD to smaller HD?


  Greetings once again!

  Where to start..?  Okay, here's what I know:  I don't understand what the process was to get necessary files copied onto the hard drive for the whole IPAQ/SightSeer project, but I know it's working on the one hard drive in the IPAQ.  So, what I attempted to do was to take an image of the drive so as to restore that to another hard drive.  Unfortunately, Symantec Ghost 8.0(Win32), with which I'm quite familiar doesn't work on the restoration part even though it's supposed to support ext2 & ext3.  What I get is gobbledy-gook that doesn't work.  Have also tried G4L and DD, both of which also seem to image fine but can't restore to another drive, even one the same size or larger. :(

  Taking another tack, I ran across this nifty System Rescue CD located here: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page which amoung other things has a utility called GPartEd - pretty cool actually.  Throwing caution to the wind, I managed to make a copy of the partition from the 20 Gig HD onto a 30 Gig HD that I had sitting around; doing so was successful, until I found I couldn't boot off the 30 Gig. Grr...  Thinking back to my DOS days, I remembered that partitions needed to be "Active" in order to boot, so I checked the "Flag" for the drive and found it wasn't set to "Boot" - checkmark on that - problem solved!  Working 30 Gig HD. :)

  Okay, so now I've got a duplicate which is a big step forward!!  Next item: how to get it on a smaller hard drive?  Well, I found that GPartEd allows me to shrink partitions so I found I could shrink it down to around 572 meg and it would still work; going under about 540 meg(or roughly 512 multiplied out) gave me some "geometry errors", so I just left it at about 572 meg.  One would think I could then copy onto a smaller HD?  Wrong!!  Have tried a 4 gig, 8 gig, 10 gig, 15 gig - nothing works!  Ideally, I'd like to place this sucker on a 2 Gig drive, as that would allow me the greatest flexibility.  Any ideas?

  By the way, I tried Acronis True Image (Echo Workstation) Trial, but apparently the "fully operational" version which lasts for 15 days doesn't bother mentioning that that's only inside of Windows!!   I'd created the bootable CD and it was ready to clone the 30 Gig onto a 4 Gig before reporting that issue.  Grrrr....  There's gonna be a heated note to Acronis about that one!

  So I'm open to ideas.  Anyone?

  Rich





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