Patent ID: 8209680

Claim:
A method for creating an image of a source disk of a first computer on a destination disk of a second computer that includes an operating system and file system software, the method comprising: mounting in the second computer, a simulated source disk corresponding to the source disk of the first computer such that the simulated source disk is accessible by the operating system in the second computer as a local disk, the file system software within the second computer detecting a file system of the mounted simulated source disk, exposing the file system to the software running on the second computer, and issuing sector-based I/O requests toward the simulated source disk; intercepting sector-based I/O requests directed to the simulated source disk and retrieving source disk data from the source disk according to the intercepted sector-based I/O requests such that contents of the source disk in the first computer are extracted at the sector level and system software in the first computer need not detect the file system of the source disk; creating a destination image as a virtual disk; and populating the destination image in the destination disk of the second computer with the contents of the source disk such that the destination image has a different sector-by-sector content than the source disk but a destination file system logically equivalent to the source file system.