It turns out that my BIOS and ATA interface cannot handle HDs bigger
than 137 GB, so I am switching my new larger drives to another computer
and using its drives in the P3 - ie, lots of copying drives and partitions.
The dd command has worked well, and saves me a lot of time compared to
copying in DOS. Thanks.
I have 2 other problems:
1) I need to copy a primary partition on one drive to a logical
partition on another. I assume that if I do something like this:
# dd if=/dev/hdc3 of=/dev/hda7 bs=1M
that the boot sector of the primary will overwrite partition info in the
boot sector of the logical partition, destroying extended partition
info. Is there a way around this? If I create the logical partition
with Partition Magic under DOS and copy into it, skipping the first
sector, will that work?
2) I also installed Linux in my P4. When Linux complained it couldn't
read the partition tables for sda, I let it rewrite them, thinking this
was the new drive I put in. Instead, it was my serial ATA drive array.
I have it configured to show up as one large drive under Windows. A
large number of ATI video files were stored on the drive, which shows up
in Linux as 2 drives (unallocated) and continues to show up in Windows
as 1 drive - but now unallocated.
The original drive was partitioned as a single FAT32 partition for the
whole drive. My guess is that the data is still intact, and could be
recovered if I put the right partition info onto the boot sector.
Is there a simple way to recover this? If I created a new FAT32
partition in the "unallocated" space using Partition Magic in DOS or
Windows, is that likely to recover the data?
Also having some boot problems, but I think I can get around that.
As a newbie, I'm getting into a little more than what Disk Druid can
handle for me.
John Lange wrote:
>There was a lot of detail there but I think if I understand your problem
>correctly you are trying to occationally replicate data between 2
>partitions?
>
>The linux command "dd" is typically used for these kinds of
>applications. I think someone mentioned it in a previous email on this
>topic?
>
>dd does not care what data is on the drive, if its mounted or in use, or
>about partitions or anything of the sort. The only time dd will fail is
>when it encounters an error while trying to read or write.
>
>So, a brief example would be:
>
># dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hdb2 bs=1M
>
>
>
--
-Dan
Dr. Dan Martin, MD, CCFP, BSc, BCSc (Hon)
GP Hospital Practitioner
Computer Science grad student
ummar143(a)cc.umanitoba.ca
(204) 831-1746
answering machine always on