Is there a way to do a sector level copy/clone from one hard drive to another?
- by irrational John
Without going into distracting details, I'm attempting to duplicate the contents of the 500GB drive in my MacBook to another 500GB drive. But this is turning out to be an unexpected hassle because the drive contains both the OS X partition and an NTFS partition with Win 7 via Apple's Boot Camp.
With the exception of Clonezilla, the tools I have looked at so far all have some limitation. The Mac tools don't want to deal with the NTFS partition. The Windows tools are totally clueless about either the HFS+ partition and/or the hybrid MBR/GPT Boot Camp partitioning.
Clonezilla looked like it would do what I want but apparently I can't figure out how to use it. After doing what I thought was a sector to sector copy I found that only the NTFS partition had been migrated. The others were apparently empty. (And frankly, I'm not positive Clonezilla migrated the partition table correctly either).
Note: It takes over 2 hours using SATA to read/write all sectors with these drives. So I'm not up for using trial & error to narrow in on the right combination of Clonezilla options to use.
I'm beginning to think that maybe the answer is to boot Linux (probably Ubuntu) and then use some ancient BSD command. Trouble is I don't know what command (or parameters to use) in order to do a sector level copy from one drive to another. As far as I know the drives have the same number of sectors so this should be trivial. Sigh.
