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