Copying A Disk

[Marius Gedminas]

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.

> How do I edit the resulting file?

What does it mean to "edit" a disk image?

If you made an image of a filesystem rather than the whole disk (i.e.
used /dev/sdXY where X is the disk letter and Y is the partition
number), then you could mount it with

  mount -o loop,ro filename /mnt/mnt

and then access all the files on it.

HTH,
Marius Gedminas
-- 
This host is a black hole at HTTP wavelengths. GETs go in, and nothing
comes out, not even Hawking radiation.
                -- Graaagh the Mighty on rec.games.roguelike.angband
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