How can I copy an NTFS partition to my new machine's HDD using Ubuntu?

Question

Background: Got a new laptop recently. Got Ubuntu working on it and copied everything I needed from my old laptop's Ubuntu installation thusly. However, I had an NTFS partition on my old machine with some data I'd like to keep. I've resized this HDD's partitions to make space for it, but I still have to copy it.

If worse comes to worst, I guess I could make a new NTFS partition of the same size with GParted, mount them on both machines, and use ssh/rsync to copy all the files, but there's probably a better/easier/more efficient way to go about it. I did some Google searches to the effect of "copy ntfs partition over lan," but there's too much out there to process. I try to solve these problems with Google when I can, but in this case, I think I've gotten to the point of needing to ask people directly.

Answer 1

You can use the dd command for that. If you wanted to clone an entire disk, you would do something like sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb. That would make sdb a complete copy of sda, including partitions and everything. It does not check that there's room on the second disk, so make sure there is.

To copy a filesystem from one partition to the other, is just as easy: sudo dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdxx. IF is for input file and OF is for output file. You can do this with files as well. For instance, to copy a filesystem to a file, you'll use sudo dd=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/somefile.img. You could then transport the file however you wished, and then use the file as the input and the partition as output; dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/sda1.

Answer 2

What about copying data using a normal GIU file manager of your choice? When copying data over network, the underlying filesystem is largely irrelevant. If the partition is not shared over network already and you prefer a command-line solution, then using scp or rsync is probably the easiest.