mirroring an encrypted hdd without truecrypt

[assaiki]

Hello

I would like to ask you guys about the possibilities of mirroring a truecrypt volume.
I have a 3TB hdd (non-system partition), already encrypted with truecrypt, and I would like to mirror the whole volume to an another 3TB drive _without_ mounting it, or even installing truecrypt.
Is it possible to mirror it using a software that can copy a drive bit by bit?
It is essential for me, that the mirror have to be done _without_ using truecrypt.

Can you guys give me some opinion about it?

I'm using Win7 64bit, the volume I want to mirror was created with truecrypt 7.0a
hdd: Toshiba 3TB

[GigabyteProductions]

Yes. It is possible to mirror the entire volume without TrueCrypt being installed. The method you named (copy byte for byte) is how you would do it. I don't know what software you would use on Windows to do this, though, since I am a Linux user.

If you cannot find software to copy partitions byte for byte for Windows, you could boot into a live installation of Linux (meaning it runs only within RAM after booting into a CD or flash drive), and run

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/SOURCE of=/dev/DESTINATION bs=65536 conv=sync,noerror

within a terminal, where SOURCE is the file within /dev that represents your original volume and DESTINATION represents the file within /dev that represents the destination. You will need to create a partition on the destination drive that matches the source partitions size exactly, (number of sectors needs to match) or you could also copy the entire drive's contents, which will also copy the partition table.

If you want to see the progress of the copy as it happens, you could run

Code: Select all

sudo su -c 'dd if=/dev/SOURCE of=/dev/DESTINATION bs=65536 conv=noerror,sync & PROCESS=$! ; sleep 1 ; while kill -0 $PROCESS 2>/dev/null ; do kill -USR1 $PROCESS ; sleep 1 ; done'

If you use a live CD with gparted, I think gparted can do this by itself.

A live CD/installation of the Linux distribution I like can be downloaded at http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CD ... 0/release/ (the .iso files are the actual files; the .torrent files are for swarm downloading; I think the rest are for veritifcation). You can use software like ImgBurn, on http://www.imgburn.com/ to burn the .iso file to a CD, or you can go through http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/ ... on-windows to put it on a bootable flash drive. When booting into this flash drive, you click "Try Xubuntu without installing". You can use gparted from within this live CD to find which /dev files is your drives/partitions. You need to be very careful to not make a typo when using the dd command with sudo as you may overwrite everything.

I'm sorry that my advice is Linux based or all over the place. There's many ways to do this. When I looked for partition cloning software for Windows, a bunch of the first page of search was, "Try for free!", or had "Private license" in screenshots, or had "Free for non-commerical use" all over the website, and I just can't recommend that kind of software to people. CloneZilla looks to be a free and open source cloning program, but that also appears to be a live CD. You can find all of these by searching for "clone partition windows".

[assaiki]

Thanks for your detailed reply!

I have yet to decide what program I will use to mirror the volume.
Of course I'm considering linux as a possibility.