Thursday, April 19, 2012

Failed Migrations


In my attempts to migrate encrypted drive, I tried so far following methodologies, unsuccessfully:

Failed: Clone using Acronis

Pre-install OS on a target disk. Encrypt OS. Boot original disk, and mount target disk using truecrypt. Perform Acronis image migration.

Result: fail because Acronis does not see TrueCrypt-mapped target disk as a valid device, so won't migrate to it.

Failed: Try cloning via Ubuntu:

- Boot Ubuntu.
- Copy sector-by-sector source to target (really, all I care at this time is MBR and partition table).
- delete system partition on target and recreate it in order to resize. Truecrypt will still accept that partition.
- Install TrueCrypt. Mount both drives to /dev/mapper/truecrypt1 and 2.
- Use ntfsclone to clone from 1 to 2.
- Use ntfsresize to make ntfs partition fill the space

Result: NTFS looks fine, disk looks fine. chkdsk finds no problems. Boot prompts for all the right stuff. System won't boot.

I think the reason why I'm failing is that TrueCrypt pre-boot code still thinks, that the drive is smaller than it actually is. If this is the case, a hybrid approach of 1) and 2) might work:

- Partition target disk to match source disk scheme
- Install OS to target, encrypt it.
- Boot Ubuntu, mount both source and target partitions.
- Clone NTFS using ntfsclone, and then resize using ntfsresize.


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