How to stop XP from writing to a hard drive?

[curtis_87]

I want to clone a hard disk from another computer but I am really skittish bout windows trying to write to the hard drive once i hook it to my PC,the server image will then be applied to a larger hard drive and hopefully windows wont know the difference. Any advice? I cant find anything out there using google.

 

[Ijack]

Use something like Clonezilla to do the cloning. That way you don't need to boot into XP whilst the drive is attached.

 

[curtis_87]

Thanks will give it a whirl, I take it it should work through a RAID controller card as well?

 

[Ijack]

According to the FAQ "Clonezilla does support hardware RAID, if your RAID device is seen as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/cciss/c0d0... on GNU/Linux. Clonezilla does support this.
On the other hand, if it's Linux software RAID, no, Clonezilla does not support that."

But it's free, so it costs you nothing to find out.