Copy bad HD to a good HD

[Andrew Farris]

On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 19:28 -0700, Karl F. Larsen wrote:
> I have an old HD that will not boot up and show windows, but 
> does run. I would like to copy as much as possible from the 
> bad to the good HD.
> 
>     First I thought about dd. It looks like $ dd if=/dev/scd 
> of=/media/disk/backup bs=2048 conv=notrunc and it looks like 
> it might work.

i think the dd method will do what you expect... however, it might be
overkill if all you need to do is save a few files from a dying windows
partition.

How do you know that the drive is bad? does palimpsest/some other
hard-disk utility say so? 
Also, are you trying to save the whole partition, just move it to a new
home, or do you just need a few files of of it?
If you're just trying to save some files, then can you not just mount
the hdd under ubuntu, and just extract the files you want that way?

As an alternative if you're just trying to move the partition to a new
home, you could always just get some empty space on your good hdd
(enough for the whole old partition) and copy/paste it to it's new home
with gparted Partition Editor.

-- 
Andrew
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