Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 21:49:36 +0100 From: Shamim Shahriar <shamim.shahriar@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: dd blocksize when copying to SSD disk Message-ID: <e4726456-31ad-99e1-adec-28aefef4edfd@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <2338862.z0bWHT8yXQ@curlew.lan> References: <b2926488-b93b-9586-898e-1ec697529a97@kukulies.org> <20160831184925.GA80454@neutralgood.org> <2338862.z0bWHT8yXQ@curlew.lan>
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On 31/08/2016 20:40, Mike Clarke wrote: > On Wednesday 31 Aug 2016 14:49:25 Kevin P. Neal wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 06:35:28PM +0200, Christoph P.U. Kukulies wrote: >>> I'm about to copy an existing Windows 7 system to an SSD. Source drive >>> is a hard disk of 256 GB, destination drive a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO. >>> >>> >>> >>> Given the fact that unnecessary write operations to SSDs should be >>> avoided I'm thinking about the best strategy to use dd to write to the >>> SSD. >> I'm not sure that dd is the best strategy. Using Windows to do the copy >> may be better. > But the Windows copy command isn't very good at copying the entire system, it > will fail to copy open files and certain "special" system files. On the other > hand dd will copy everything in the partition but at the expense of wasting > space by copying all the unused blocks. > > An alternative would be to use Driveimage XML > <www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm> from within Windows to create a > compressed backup of all used blocks in the system. It's also available on a > Knopixx live CD <www.runtime.org/data-recovery-live-cd> which, I think, runs > it under wine so it could probably be run under wine on FreeBSD to create or > restore a backup of an entire Windows partition. > As far as I can remember G4L has the provision of copying NTFS partitions data-only. We used to use it to create/transfer image from a sysprepped system to numerous other machines. The good bit was that it did not need a running windows as G4L comes with its own bootable image/iso. Have you considered that yet? Hope this helps.
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