Booting NOT-Windows

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Wednesday 20 August 2008 20:13, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> So, one thing I like to do is to create a disk image of the damaged
> disk before trying anything else.  That way you can go back if
> 'recovery' attempts do more damage than good.  This is largely a
> question of what your data is worth and what your risk aversion is
> like.  NewEgg recently had $500GB disk on sale for $50, so we're not
> talking very expensive here.

I've troubleshooting a lot of Windows 2000 and XP laptops lately for tasks 
that require moving filesystems from one hard disk to another.  I have found 
that my trusty dd methods really don't work that well, at least not wth a 
suspect drive.

To move a partition from one disk to another, I was using dd (and sometimes 
just cat) with bzip2 and netcat to rip an image from one disk and dump it to 
another disk in another laptop in realtime.  I found that while most of the 
filesystem arrived at its destination intact, many parts of it did not.  I 
could boot up the old drive with a Knoppix disk and get access to those 
files, retransmit them as files over sftp/scp or something, and then they'd 
work, but in the image, they were not kept intact.

Has anyone else run into this or know what causes this?  I guess I never 
bothered with the "bs=8M conv=noerror,sync" options you specified.  Do you 
think those would have made a difference?
-N