Moving Windows without Ghost
2007-06-30
As there is no copy of Ghost around, I was unable to move my Windows 2000 to new harddisk for a short while. After Bunny’s suggestion, I give ntfsclone a try. It only claims to be able to move NTFS partition, nothing more. Not even fixing boot record.
Probably I’m lucky, since after cloning a damaged NTFS partition (with lots of bad sector), Windows still manage to boot! Most likely because of my habit of always installing Windows on the very first partition of every disk, thus the boot record of cloned partition fits completely on the new disk. The bad sectors have been biting me in the past (damaging an important DLL and render the Windows partition unbootable), so it is still unsafe to say I have a fully usable Windows again. Still, perhaps time for a reinstall, but at least there is a plan B.
2007-07-02 update: Finally, I have spent a whole night re-installing Windows. The bad sectors have damaged some not-so-critical yet still essential files (shellext, java stuff, …) . Under that state some applications can’t be installed, basically leaving me a broken system.
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