Copying A Disk

[Pete Holsberg]

Karl Larsen wrote:
> Pete Holsberg wrote:
>   
>> 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?
>   

Media Center

>> 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. 

Actually there's no enclosure. See 
<http://www.xpcgear.com/idesataadapter.html>
> 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.
>   

I don't want to boot from the drive, just hook iot as an external HD.

>> 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 :-)
>   

100s Why are you surprised?
>> 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.
>   

What??

>> 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. 
>   

Isn't that what I was saying?

>     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.
>   

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

Unable to read /dev/sdb

???