OT: What FS is the Windows XP recovery partition?
Kevin Brown
kevin_brown at qwest.net
Sun Sep 25 23:57:23 MST 2005
>>>>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...
More information about the PLUG-discuss
mailing list