[arch-general] Wanted: advice dual-booting Arch and Windows 7 on new laptop

[Georgios Nikolopoulos]

>Personally if you have a large enough separate drive and enough
>patience. I would do a bit level copy which if successful is guaranteed
>to put the disk back exactly.
>
>#/bin/dd bs=32k if=/dev/sd? | /usr/bin/gzip > /media/usb0/hpBACKUP.dd.gz
>
>Restore with
>
>#/bin/cat /media/usb0/hpBACKUP.dd.gz | /usr/bin/gunzip | /bin/dd bs=32k
>of=/dev/sd?

You could also use ntfsclone which is part of the ntfsprogs package to get
an image of the windows partition just after resizing the partitions.

ntfsclone -s -o sda1.img /dev/sda1

Now provided that the partition table entry does not change position or
size you can restore it to its original state with
ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sda1 sda1.img

The main benefit of this method is that ntfsclone understands empty space
in the partition and the resulting image is only marginally larger than the
actual data stored in the partition.

For example an ntfs partition with size 100GB having 20GB of data and the
rest being empty space could be backed up to a 20GB image file.

George Nikolopoulos