How to copy partitions under GNU/Linux the easy way

After getting a new disk for my Popcorn Hour A-110 device I had to copy all partitions from the old disk onto the new one so I do not have to reinstall some applications and reconfigure everything.

After searching the web and trying to find a free alternative to Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, preferably not using a boot disk on its own (I did not want to backup my workstation after all, just a simple partition to partition copy between two SATA disks) I gave up and decided to do the copying manually.

So I fired up gparted to do the partitioning, did a right click and... I noticed that gparted supports copy/paste. Being curious about what this could potentially do I gave it a try. I marked partition one on the old disk, did a copy, went to the new disk and clicked on paste - and guess what, gparted did what I was looking for.

Putting a long story short: you can copy whole partitions using gparted's copy/paste mechanism and even resize them whilst doing so. I am somehow ashamed I did not notice this feature earlier, having been a gparted user for a few years now and I can imagine I am not the only one who missed that.

Syndicated 2009-12-01 17:22:00 (Updated 2009-12-01 17:23:47) from sp