Just logging my results for any other new-comers, like myself.
I found another article stating that a better way to clone NTFS drives was to use NTFSRESIZE and NTFSCLONE.
It is supposed to be way faster as it doesn't have to account for all of the unused space on the drive (which is a LOT, in my case - 250GB).
Sadly, I was unable to figure out how to make it work properly.
Linux DD, however, has been a champ. It's been incredibly weird and unpredictable, but I successfully cloned two drives in a row.
I simply connected a SATA drive of the same size, activated it in the BIOS, and booted from my Ultimate Edition 2.8 Live CD (USB) to the machine with my clean and updated "master" XP install drive.
Both local drives showed up in Ultimate Edition as 250GB drives, and I verified the contents and checked the IDs using
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sudo fdisk -l
Then used:
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sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
Now for the weirdness...
The first time, I let DD run over night... When I came in, it still hadn't completed in the terminal. I let it run halfway through the day, then I couldn't wait any longer because I had to distribute the PC. I was forced to shutdown before it completed, but for grins I let Ultimate Edition fire up prior to removing the attempted clone.
I ran the fdisk -l and it reported exact duplicates, so I got excited and mounted the drive. Lo and behold, all of the files were accessible, and matched the master drive. I still had doubts that it would boot, so I removed it and stuffed it into the other box and - voila - it booted! The other machine had different hardware from the master, but XP detected most of it, and what it didn't I had included drivers for on my master.
I decided to try this again, today, but I wasn't going to let it run all night. This time, I used a 250G drive with a Linux partition. Same steps.
I let it run for less than 8 hours, then shut it down and rebooted. In Ultimate Edition I attempted to mount the duplicated drive and was successful. The file structure matched the master, so I tried booting it and, again, it was successful!
I don't understand why dd is not completing, and I'm even more perplexed that the cloned drives are working perfectly. It would be nice to know if dd is actually completing successfully but not terminating it's process when done.
Anyone else ever experienced this??