[achmeingott]

So I successfully set up my Win 7, OSX 10.6.5, Ubuntu 10.10 triple boot (thank you anguish, jbeamer and crabhunter, all of you helped). My question is, I just upgraded my 5200 rpm 320gb hdd to a 7200 rpm 320gb hdd, I put the old one in a cheap enclosure and I was wondering if there's an easy way to back up the entire hdd with all 3 partitions intact. Not that it would be hard to set up the triple boot again, I just think it would be exponentially easier to just restore it if something goes wrong.

[reflex]

You can save a "drive image" of the entire internal drive to a file on the external. Then restore that file if/when needed. Both sides of this process will be slow, since you're moving many, many GBs across USB.

Or you can "clone" the internal to the external. Cloning might require shrinking a partition, if the external is slightly smaller than the internal. Cloning will "waste" the entire external drive, but activating the external should be as simple as swapping hard drives.

Personally, I'd boot off a Linux LiveCD/USB and use basic Unix/Linux tools to perform the imaging, but there are smarter and friendlier utilities, too.

From a LiveCD, creating a compressed drive image could be as simple as:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > drive.img.gz

Cloning a drive to a larger target could be as simple as:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Don't just run these commands blindly, though.

[crabhunter]

The best way to move your OSX partition is to boot off the netbook boot cd, then your OSX dvd and use disk utility to format your new HD and then restore the old OSX partition to the new partition.
If I was in your situation there is one change I would (and probable will) make.
When you format your new drive make it mbr not guid.
Then restore your OSX partition from your original hd to the new partition.
Then use the Linux disk utility to label your root partition to whatever you want and then Chameleon will display the label.
With a GUID setup I have not been able to change the Chameleon label from Linux.
As for Win7 if you haven't installed many programs just re-install or use backup to make a copy.
I have never backed up Ubuntu.
Mike

[achmeingott]

Originally Posted by crabhunter

The best way to move your OSX partition is to boot off the netbook boot cd, then your OSX dvd and use disk utility to format your new HD and then restore the old OSX partition to the new partition.
If I was in your situation there is one change I would (and probable will) make.
When you format your new drive make it mbr not guid.
Then restore your OSX partition from your original hd to the new partition.
Then use the Linux disk utility to label your root partition to whatever you want and then Chameleon will display the label.
With a GUID setup I have not been able to change the Chameleon label from Linux.
As for Win7 if you haven't installed many programs just re-install or use backup to make a copy.
I have never backed up Ubuntu.
Mike

Yeah, I was trying to change the "Linux" title as well the other day but gave up. I did come up with some pretty nice icons though. I also managed to change the grub countdown from 10 to 0 so it boots directly into ubuntu after chamelon.

Anways, thanks for the tips guys, I'll probably just clone it through my ubuntu usb stick. This is literally my first experience with linux, but I'm really loving it and I think I'm picking up the CLI pretty quick.

Said icons.