0

I have a ntfs partition, GPT, of 5.6 TB containing only 200 GB of data, that I need to fit onto a 1 TB partition (of a vmware ESXi guest).
Vmware converter does not support GPT.
Acronis disk director does not support GPT.

As I am not very familiar with the Windows operating system, I would rather not copy over "network shares", ftp or similar - I foresee too many problems with that. (correct me if Im wrong!).

I could dd/parted/gzip the raw partition, but unpacking it to a smaller partition might cause problems. Anyone know if problems like that could be resolved by running CHKDSK or similar?

What wuld you do?

3molo
  • 4,330
  • 5
  • 32
  • 46

1 Answers1

2

I'd mount the filesystem and copy it at a file level rather than trying to disk image it. I suspect it'll end up being faster for you and you won't have to contend with disk partitioning issues.

The built-in (at least in Windows Vista and newer) robocopy command can copy all the files, metadata, and ACLs pretty easily.

You could use a Linux distro with GPT support and the ntfsprogs ntfsclone to close the filesytem.

I wouldn't copy the filesystem raw at a block level, though. I'd have a hard time trusting it after doing that.

Evan Anderson
  • 141,881
  • 20
  • 196
  • 331
  • I have a robocopy /MIR running, not sure if that actually preserves ACLs or not. I think I will have to initiate the iscsi luns directly to the server and robocopy locally (between DAS and SAN luns), rather than over samba.. – 3molo Mar 16 '11 at 20:07
  • Seems ACLs are not preserved by default (COPY:DAT), so '/MIR COPY:DATSO' are the options to use. – 3molo Mar 16 '11 at 20:17