Copy bad HD to a good HD

[Karl F. Larsen]

Andrew Farris wrote:
> 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.
> 

	You may be right. Thanks for the idea of gparted. If that 
works it should be the best.

	My plan is to have both good and bad HD running in this 
computer and boot up in a liveCD. There I have dd and gparted 
and try both, starting with gparted. Then I can inspect the 
bad HD and see what is really there.

	A couple months ago we took the bad HD to a computer store 
and asked them to get what they could. We were stupid because 
we didn't tell them what we wanted. Today I know I need to get 
all of a package called Actwin. It is a thing you put names 
and address and email address for friends. They got a lot of 
pictures but not that, of course.

	We need all those names...

Thanks! Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
         Key ID = 3951B48D