Copying A Disk

[Pete Holsberg]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:38:30 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:

> Pete Holsberg wrote:
>> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:08:53 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 06:52:12PM -0400, Pete Holsberg wrote:
>>>     
>>>> I have a disk that is not accessible in Windows and it was suggested
>>>> that I could copy it in its entirety using
>>>>
>>>> "dd noerror if=/dev/hdX  of=~/filename"  where hdX is the drive and
>>>> filename is the name for the copy.
>>>>       
>>> I believe that should be "dd conv=noerror", note the 'conv=' bit in
>>> front of 'noerror'.  Also, in modern systems it's often /dev/sdX
>>> instead of /dev/hdX.
>>>
>>>
>>>> How do I know what X is?
>>>>       
>>> Use lshal (or the graphical device manager) and search for your disk.
>>> For example, a 120 GB Hitachi disk is shown on my laptop as
>>>
>>>   udi =
>>>   '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/
>>>     
>> storage_serial_1ATA_HITACHI_HTS541612J9SA00_SB2D51EVG60DLE'
>>   
>>>     block.device = '/dev/sda'  (string)
>>>     ...
>>>     info.product = 'HITACHI HTS54161'  (string) ... storage.size =
>>>     120034123776  (0x1bf2976000)  (uint64) ...
>>>
>>> The manufacturer, model, serial number and size help you identify the
>>> disk, and block.device shows you how to access it.
>>>     
>>>     
>> Where would a USB drive appear?
>>
>>
>     First read man dd. You can't copy from a partition and to a file.
> This will not work. You say you want to copy a disk. How big is the
> disk? Does it run? How do you connect to it? How many partitions are on
> the disk? Why does Windows not see this disk?
> 
>     You need to have another disk to copy to.

Let me start at the beginning.

My stepson's Dell laptop's HD suffered a failure, probably a head crash, 
and would no longer boot.

I removed it and connected to my Windows XP machine  via a SATA/USB 
external adapter cable.

XP recognized it and allowed me to copy files. At one point, it hung and 
started giving me paging errors.

My Vista machine didn't like it at all, and knocked out the USB 
controller. Rebooting brought it back.

A SUSE guy on a Windows mailing list suggested connecting it to my Linux 
camputer.

Now, you're up to date.

Goal: salvage as many files as I can.