more computer travails.

[mrsbrown]

I'm planning to use G's 40GB hard disk to replace the dead as a dodo hard disk I mentioned last week.

I was stupid and tired when I got home this arvo, so I let mr_bassman get on with copying/ghosting the data from G's 40GB hard disk to the new 120GB hard disk He used partition magic and it didn't work.

After my nap, based on an off the cuff comment of vonstrassburg's, I did my usual internet research, found this site and had a go.

Twice.

I keep getting an i/o error on the old hard drive when I do the dd from partition to partition. I've ignored it and gone on with the process as described, although the error message in the root terminal window I'm using suggests that the qtparted on the knoppix cd I have doesn't support NTFS. The partition seems to be the correct size when I check it with knoppix, but when I boot into windows, via the old disk, it's only reading two drives each with 46GB of space, and the new one doesn't have as much data as it should.

Now what do I do?

Without any other suggestions I'm nearly at the point where I will format the new 120GB drive, reinstall windows on it and reinstall the small number of applications G says he had on his old drive. I guess I'll even put his data back onto the new drive.

THEN I can start the rebuild process on the webserver.

The good thing about all this is that I have knitted about 10 rows of my new beret. Formatting and partitioning hard disks is a process perfectly suited to getting other things done.

Comments

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

OK I have to admit that this page looks really dodgy. I wouldn't do that. In particular errors while doing dd are basically fatal. dd does a really unintelligent block by block copy which is not what you want on two hard disk drives of different geometries.

I might be tempted to try ntfstools, here: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html#ntfstools

However I'd still be inclined to do a reinstall of windows, and copy the files across the network or something.

Good luck with the web server rebuild, although it sounds like a straight FC3 install so should not be rocket science. sjkasabi has one of my DVD burners so she now has a spare DVD drive and CD burner -- the DVD drive may be a useful add-on to the web server.

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

Here is the backup program you want. Works best if you can tell it to make ISO images the size of a DVD and burn them with a DVD burner:

http://mkcdrec.indyramp.net/