I've been trying to clone a hard drive since last night on a laptop (windows xp, sata drive), I was going to do a fresh install and manually setup everything, but I figured a clone would be alot quicker (after about 5-6 hours, it wasn't, but I'd still like not manually setup the computer with apps/drivers/email, etc...)

I really really don't want to create an "image" which needs to be restored to the new drive (causing me to repartition the drive for space for the image, and having to delete and expand that partition after everything is all restored), I'd like to clone to a usb drive with the sata>usb adapter I have.

I tried Ghost 12, which is the worst program on the planet, it seemed to work, but windows would load the welcome screen that refuse to load the desktop (it can only do a clone while windows is running).

PING, which requires an image to be created first, then for it to be restored

HDclone which seemed to work, but I get the glorious NTLDR missing

and a handful other other programs which didn't support USB at all for the destination

So, my question, should I do this in ubuntu with dd? if so what would be the command, and both drives are NTFS.

or is there another program I'm missing?

or should I just try and repair the NTLDR?