Windows – How to copy/clone a dynamic disk in Windows 7

Create a BartPE CD with the EASEUS ToDo Backup plugin.

Tutorial: Run EASEUS Todo Backup from BartPE based boot CD-ROM

• Connect your external hard drive
• Boot into BartPE and clone your disk to the external drive.
• Replace the old HDD with the new drive.
• Boot into BartPE again and clone your external disk back to the new HDD.

You can also use Clonezilla, but you must clone to image file if the external HDD is larger than 60 GB, as it will not allow you to clone driectly to a target drive smaller than the source.

"dynamic" disks are a Microsoft Windows solution and are not compatible with anything else, including some other versions of Windows (Home Edition, for example). They don't use any hardware assist either. I can't imagine any Linux supporting dynamic disks.

I have successfully used Windows XP and Windows 7 with Intel SATA RAID motherboards in a mirrored configuration. RAID mirrors have saved my patooty on several occasions, but I also faced a situation where I lost a disk and the other disk partition was damaged, so I recommend using RAID mirrors with a partition imaging backup, to protect against total loss.

That said, I haven't tried Intel SATA RAID controllers with ubu-9.10. I DID try to dual-boot a Ubuntu/WinXP configuration on the last major release of Ubuntu, but despite many tutorials purporting to show how to configure Intel RAID for Ubu, none of them worked.

If you don't have a RAID hardware assist, then don't do RAID. If you do have a RAID controller, you'll need to convert your Windows install to RAID first (not really very hard) and then see if you can find a tutorial for ubu-9.10 that actually works.