--- Kevin Brown wrote: > >>>>My sister's HP has been sending out ominous "drive about to fail" > >>>>messages. She asked me to help replace her drive. I did what I > >>>>normally do: after adding the new drive, I booted the system in > Knoppix > >>>>to try to do the copy. The problem was the 5 GB "recovery" partition > at > >>>>the beginning of the disk. Knoppix could not recognize this. The same > >>>>held true for Seagate's setup utility, which boots with DR-DOS (the > >>>>replacement drive is a Seagate.) Does anybody know what kind of file > >>>>system the Evil Empire uses for this partition? Secondly, is it now > >>>>safe to use Linux to copy NTFS files? My version of Knoppix is 3.3 and > >>>>I've since downloaded 4.0, but I don't want to drive back to my > sister's > >>>>house unprepared. Is there a good Linux tool to do this? > >>> > >>> > >>>Most likely that is either a norton ghost image or a drive image image > >>>at the head of the drive. As for copying NTFS... well I would think a > >>>dd image of the drive would survive without issues, then use an NTFS > >>>safe application like PQMagic to expand the NTFS drive to fill the > >>>remainder of the new volume. > > >>I'll second that. > >> > >>dd just copies whatever's there, so I'd expect that it would copy the > >>recovery partition and the NTFS partition just fine. just "dd > >>if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1k" to copy the whole drive (after booting a > >>live CD, with no partitions on the drives mounted). Be sure to use the > >>appropriate designations for the drives as you have them installed. > >> > >>(I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.) > >> > > > > > > I'm not sure I would try to copy everything with partition table > (although as > > far as I know, as long as the new disk is larger it might work.) I would > > create partitions on the destination drive, then use dd on each one, then > > expand partitions if needed. > > The problem with that is that the NTFS partitions might not take too > kindly to being in a space larger than they say they should be. Fat and > Fat32 might not be a problem though... I didn't think it mattered, but I haven't done much mucking about with partitions and copying in this way, so perhaps I should bow out of this discussion :) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss