Previous subject was:  How to ghost a win98 partition
  I owe you folks a report on this, and I have
  a few new questions about rescue tools.

Thanks to Alan and Bart for the advice on recovering
this partition.  I continued to fail until I moved
the whole shooting match to different hardware.
But Linux allowed me to move the whole Win98 environment
using a straight "copy" -- a few notes on that below.

The BIOS on the old machine (or the "new" one for
that matter) was unable to grok the 7 GB IDE drive,
so I settled for the 2+ GB that it could see --
I haven't contested this since I want to keep it
simple and there's no way the user of this machine
can use 2 GB.  (But how did that machine previously
host 6 GB SCSI drives?  I'm guessing that was made
possible by the SCSI controller which was a separate
card.)

Q1:  Is anyone aware of harm done by operating a
hard disk on the wrong definition?  Does this strain
the device in any weird and unnatural way?  It is a
Maxtor, cost me less than $30 and was not previously
used.

Oh, I also got a 40 GB Western Digital and decided
not to waste it.  It will probably go into my
secondary Linux box (which may be our old trouble
maker, but we'll see how that goes).

I tried "dd" to copy my old SCSI volume to the new
IDE and it seemed to work, but the resulting partition
came up broken.  Linux didn't like it, let alone
windows.  (I did not defrag it first, but it was
a very new Windows installation and I'm sure
it was all well within the first gig.)

Q2:  When you do an unlimited "dd", will it always
end with an error message when it hits the end of
the source drive?

I was disadvantaged because I did not have the
right Linux setup.  I used Red Hat 8.0 Disk #1,
tomsrtbt floppy, and a knoppix disk.  The broken
machine failed to load two of these -- I did learn
to say "knoppix single" (I think it was) to
keep it basic.  I was having trouble with my
CD drives too.  And I could not find "parted" on
the ones that worked, so really I wasn't well
equipped.

Q3:  Can anyone recommend to me a live CD that
I can download, that will bring up a nice and
basic set of tools?  I don't need no stinkin GUI.
I definitely need a full GRUB kit and parted.
I'd like full support for FAT32 and NTFS.

So I used Win98's FDISK to partition the space
that it could see, and did a format /s.

Back to Linux, I did an archive copy with -i
to prompt me on replacements, and said "no" to
COMMAND.COM, MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS which were
already present from the formatting.

Q4:  Does Windows care where the above three files
reside on the disk?  I started my first copy with
the -f option and then decided to re-do it so that
those files would be placed wherever format puts
them.

When I went to compare the files on the source and
desitination volumes, I got some differences in some
.DLL files.  Windows came up fine, but would still
blue-screen occasionally, or just quietly lock up.
I stuck the disk in another box - no other hardware
in common - and reinstalled Windows and Money, and
we were in good shape.

The "new" box is a former commercial web server,
just a Pentium 166.  It hosted 17 hotel-shopping
domains for four years on FreeBSD, earning up to
$2.5M in good years, before being put on the junk
pile.  Then it hosted my Debian experiments a few
months ago.  I hope it doesn't mind running Windows
for the first time ... :-(
My wife says it's *much* faster than the
broken Pentium 200 it replaced.

... and I'll put my Debian Hard Disk into the
machine that gave us all this trouble, so we'll
see if it flies or crashes.

Thanks again,

Vic

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