[RndTbl] drive partitioning for Linux install

[Dan Martin]

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 at cc.umanitoba.ca
(204) 831-1746
answering machine always on