Copying A Disk

[Christian Csar]

Karl Larsen wrote:
> Pete Holsberg wrote:
>> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:08:53 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> 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.
>>>     
>> Where would a USB drive appear?
>>
>>
>>
>>   
>     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.
> 
> Karl
> 
> 

One can use dd to dump a partition to a file, for instance I did
sudo dd count=5 if/dev/sda1 of=./dump which copies the first 5 blocks of
/dev/sda1 to a file.

If know that your disk is formatted in something windows should be able
to read (NTFS FAT32), then it may be the case that the hard drive itself
is damaged. In this case you might consider gdd whose purpose is recovery.

If you do not know how the disk is formatted you may just want to try
plugging it in to the computer and seeing if it mounts and the files are
 accessible.

Christian