New twist on drive copy - Win - Win using Linux to stage?

[Monty Harder]

From: The Hoelschers <mohoel at telocity.com>

  0. Make a Win98 boot floppy and test it, unless the laptop can boot from
the W98 CD.  (Alternatively, you can dd the boot sector of the W98 partition
to a file like C:WIN98.BSS, then dd it back in step 5 below,  but you need
a boot floppy anyway.)  I recommend using the EBD from the CD if possible to
do this

>1. Use available space on my desktop drive (/dev/hda)
>  {a directory in the FAT32 partition housing Windows?
>  {a directory under Linux ext2?
>  {make a seperate partition and format for Dos?

  Naah.  Just need room for a tarball....

>2. Copy the 1.3 gig laptop drive to this space
>  {which method would be best for Windows data? DD, TAR, CPIO?

  DD isn't good because it will make another 1.3GB partition, and you want
the whole 3.0 to be usable (unless you want to set aside a small swap
partition or something)  I'd use tar/gzip, to save long file names, preserve
dates of access and write, etc.  Should be faster this way, too, because the
processor time to do compression is less than the time to access a HD.

>3. Swap the 1.3 for the 3.0

  3.5  Make sure the primary partition on the 3.0 is marked active.

>4. Copy that space to the 3.0 gig drive

  ...just unpack the tarball.

  5.  Boot from the floppy, and do
        SYS C:
[or dd that boot sector back from the file made in 0.]  This is the most
important step, because otherwise the drive won't be bootable - building the
tarball doesn't copy the boot sector since it isn't an actual file.
  6.  Test the drive to make sure it's working correctly.  There's no reason
why it shouldn't at this point, but we never assume anything....
  7.  Mount the 1.3 gig drive in your Linux box for swap and maybe a
maintenance partition - might as well get some use out of it.