In this article I will walk you through the process of copying a partition from one drive to another with the help of Gparted.

First things first

Before you get too involved with this process there are a couple of things you will need to know. First and foremost the ONLY way you can copy and paste a partition is if that partition is not mounted. So if that partition is on a working system, and you need that partition mounted for the system to be working, you can not just install Gparted and have at it. Instead you have to use a live CD with Gparted included, such as SystemRescueCD. With this live CD you can boot up and then run Gparted on the drive in question without any problems.

You will also need to have an external drive attached with equal or more space than the source partition. And this space needs to have enough unused space on it to accommodate the partition to be copied.

How it’s done

Figure 1

When you fire up your live cd you will need to open up a terminal window and issue the command gparted to use the tool. Normally Gparted need to be run with root privileges, but since you are using a live cd you won’t need this. When you fire up Gparted you will see your first drive listed (see Figure 1). As you can see there is a 144.42 Gb partition to copy. From that drive select that partition that will serve as the source and click the Copy button. You can also right-click the selected partition and select Paste from that menu.

Figure 2

Now click the drive drop-down and select your second drive (this will be the external drive attached to the machine). With this drive selected you should see plenty of unallocated space (see Figure 2). If you do not, you will have to make room by resizing the existing partition. Select that unallocated space and then click the Paste button. You can also right-click the selected space and choose Paste from that menu.

Figure 3

When you click the Paste button (or menu entry) a new window will open that wants you to define how much of the unallocated space to use (see Figure 3).

As you can see, in my example, there is plenty of unused space on the partition being copied. I could shrink that partition to make room for something else on that drive (should I need to). If this partition is going to be then copied to another machine, you really don’t need to worry about resizing – so long as it will fit in the unallocated space.

Once you are done, click the Paste button and the partition will be pasted. Of course the action isn’t finalized until you have clicked the Apply button. Once you have done that, there is no going back – your partitions will be copied. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time as this can be a lot of data to copy.

Final thoughts

It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works and works extremely well. Using Gparted to copy partitions from one drive to another is a great way to rescue a working system from a dying one. You might want to practice this on a non-critical machine before you do so on mission critical hardware. Just in case.

In this article I am going to show you how to set up the Partimage Server as well as save an image to it from a remote machine.

Assumptions

You will need to make sure the system you are imaging is NOT an ext4 machine (this would leave out Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13 for sure). You will also need an IP address for your server as well as super user access in order to run Partimage. Finally you will need to make sure your server has plenty of room to store the image file(s) it is to house.

Installation

You’ve already installed Partimage in the previous article. But you did not install the server. In order to install the server on Ubuntu do the following:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install partimage-server
3. Enter your sudo password.

That’s it. If you are installing on Fedora you would have to su to the root user and issue the command yum install partimage-server. On OpenSuSE that command would be zypper install partimage-server.

Configuring the server

There is very little to configure for the server. What you will need to do is open up the file /etc/partimaged/partimagedusers and add a user to that file that will be used to authenticate from the clients. The user you add MUST have an account on the Partimage server machine. There is nothing fancy about the user setup, you just add the user (or users) one per line in the file, save, and close the file.

Once you have added that user it’s time to start the server. Do this with the command /etc/init.d/partimaged restart. The server will start and you are ready to go.

Connecting to the server

Figure 1

If you refer back to the original article you will see how to get to this step. It is very similar to creating the image on the local machine, only you will select the option for Connect to server (see Figure 1).

Figure 2

Once you have filled out that information, click F5 to continue one. You will then be asked for the username/password for the user you added to the partimagedusers file. After you enter that information (see Figure 2), tab down to the OK button and hit Enter to continue on.

After the login succeeds Partimage will continue on as it did when you were saving that partition to the local drive. And when it completes, you will have an image of that system stored on your Partimage Server.

Final thoughts

Even though there is no support for ext4 file systems, Partimage does support many other types, making it a very useful tool. I would like to think that ext4 would be rolled into the system in the future, but there is not much indicating this is the case. That would also make me believe newer file systems will also not be supported. If this is the case, I hope a new tool like Partimage will arrive on the scene that will support ext4 and btrfs file systems.

A tool that can flip the bit and should work with most usb flash drives is Lexar’s USB format tool. It is a portable tool that has been designed for Lexar USB drives but it works with other brands as well. The main interface can not only be used to flip the removable bit but also to format the usb drive, set a volume label and a partition to be bootable. You only need to press the flip removable bit button if you want to prepare the flash drive for use with multiple partitions. The drive has to be removed and connected again to the computer system afterwards.

It should be noted that Lexar USB Format (via Shell City) will not partition the usb flash drive which has to be done with other tools. For that you can use the build in tools in the operating system. Read Joshua’s System Partitioning With Vista article to find out how to do that in Windows Vista. A more universal software is the gParted Live CD which can be booted from any computer system.

Another option to create multiple USB stick partitions has been discussed before at Ghacks. The process involves editing the Windows Registry and has the disadvantage that the add-on partitions are only visible on that computer system.

Before I get started I want to issue a warning. I have never had a problem using GParted Live CD, but that doesn’t mean the system is immune to problems. Problems can happen. To that end make sure you back up your XP data and even create a restore CD. This way, just in case GParted Live wreaks havoc on your data, you can restore it easily.

With that warning out of the way, let’s take a look at how GParted Live works. The screen shots you are about to see are from a VMWare installation on a Linux installation. I created a Fat32 partition in order to show you how simple GParted Live is to use.

Step One

The first thing you need to do is to defragment your XP drive. This will make sure your data is where it needs to be as well as keeping your data from the end of your drive. Once your drive is fully defragmented you are ready for step two. Of course, before step two you will need to download and burn the iso image onto CD to use.

Step Two

Put the GParted Live CD into your cd drive and reboot your machine. Getting GParted Live is simple to start. You will be asked a few questions about your keyboard, your language, and your graphics. As for the graphics, the default entry should work fine.

Once you are booted into GParted Live you will find yourself in what might be a familiar desktop. GParted Live is based on Fluxbox and is even more minimal than the standard Fluxbox.

Full sized Fat32 partition

Step Three

Select the partition you want to resize and click the “Resize/Move” button. When you click that a new window will appear asking how much you want the partition to be resized.

Set the amount to resize

You want to make sure that you are resized the space FOLLOWING the XP partition. Once you have entered the amount you want to resize the space FOLLOWING the parition hit enter and then click the Resize/Move button.

Step Four

The next step is to click the Apply button. Once you click this button the resizing will take place. Depending upon the size you have chosen to free up, this process might take some time.

Click Apply

Once the resizing has taken place you will notice the partition names will change.

A Resized partition

That’s it. click the Exit button (the red square at the top left) to shutdown GParted Live. Take the GParted Live CD out of the CD drive and let your machine reboot. Make sure XP will boot properly before you continue. Once you are sure XP will boot properly, reboot with your Linux distribution CD in the drive and install Linux.

You can follow my Illustrated Guide to Installing Ubuntu Linux for a simple Linux install how to. Another article to read, that will get you up to speed on dual booting, is my How To Dual Boot Windows Vista and Linux.

Final Thoughts

Dual booting XP and Linux doesn’t have to be difficult. Using GParted Live CD will make this task far simpler than you thought it could be. But do remember, BACK UP THAT DATA!

Testdisk, which is a open source data recovery tool, might be the tool you need when you encounter a situation like the one described above. Testdisk will only help if the errors are software based, if you encounter a problem that is hardware based you are out of luck. Just download the version of Testdisk that is offered for your operating system and execute it. If you can’t boot the system you might want to use the gparted linux distribution instead which includes testdisk and can be booted from CD. (recommended)

Please note that you need to know what you are doing, you should have at least basic knowledge about partitions, file systems and the like to proceed using a tool like testdisk. You might erase data on other partitions otherwise. After selecting wether you would like to create a new log, append to an existing log or use no log you have to choose one of the hard drives that is currently connected to your computer.

You might want to disconnect other hard drives from your computer to avoid mistakes that could erase the data on that drives. Select a partition type afterwards, Intel/PC, Apple, None, Sun and Xbox.

After that you have many options – all of them are explained in great detail in the testdisk wiki. You may analyse the partition which displays partitions and searches for lost ones, write a test MBR, change the disk geometry, erase all data and access advanced filesystem utilities for Fat, NTFS and EXT2/EXT3 which leads to options to repair the partitions.