2009-12-01

How to copy partitions under GNU/Linux the easy way

After getting a new disk for my Popcorn Hour A-110 device I had to copy all partitions from the old disk onto the new one so I do not have to reinstall some applications and reconfigure everything.

After searching the web and trying to find a free alternative to Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, preferably not using a boot disk on its own (I did not want to backup my workstation after all, just a simple partition to partition copy between two SATA disks) I gave up and decided to do the copying manually.

So I fired up gparted to do the partitioning, did a right click and... I noticed that gparted supports copy/paste. Being curious about what this could potentially do I gave it a try. I marked partition one on the old disk, did a copy, went to the new disk and clicked on paste - and guess what, gparted did what I was looking for.

Putting a long story short: you can copy whole partitions using gparted's copy/paste mechanism and even resize them whilst doing so. I am somehow ashamed I did not notice this feature earlier, having been a gparted user for a few years now and I can imagine I am not the only one who missed that.

3 comments:

  1. Nice, but it doesn't seem to understand lvm yet, so no go.

    What's wrong with partimage?

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  2. I was using g4u (netbsd based) from a guy called feyrer for these things.
    BR

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  3. @Al:

    Partimage is not available on Ubuntu karmic amd64, which my workstation is running, that's why I ruled that one out.

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