Copying A Disk

[Karl Larsen]

Pete Holsberg wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:38:30 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
>
> 		SNIP
>   
>>     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.
>   
    OK. What version of Windows does the laptop have installed?
> I removed it and connected to my Windows XP machine  via a SATA/USB 
> external adapter cable.
>   
    This I assume is a external box that you mounted the laptop hard 
drive in and it brings the hard drive out to a USB port. This is a 
problem to start with. The laptop hard drive was not loaded from the USB 
port so you can't expect this to work.
> XP recognized it and allowed me to copy files. At one point, it hung and 
> started giving me paging errors.
>
>   
    How many files did you copy with success? Was it 3 or 100 or a 
thousand? I am surprised you got any :-)

> My Vista machine didn't like it at all, and knocked out the USB 
> controller. Rebooting brought it back.
>
>   
    What version of windows is on the laptop? It must be windows XP 
since your Vista would not read it.
> A SUSE guy on a Windows mailing list suggested connecting it to my Linux 
> camputer.
>
>   
    The goal is I guess is to get as much off the broken hard drive as 
possible. I think the best thing to do is mount the laptop hard drive to 
your Linux computer. It seems the HD is a SATA type so that should be 
easy to do.

    With fdisk look at the HD and discover the partition name of the 
windows. Now mount that partition on your Linux. This step might be 
difficult depending on the file system.


> Now, you're up to date.
>
> Goal: salvage as many files as I can.
>
>
>   
Good Luck

Karl



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
   PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C  ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7