Booting NOT-Windows - NTFS

[Michael ODonnell]

> dd methods really don't work that well, at least not wth a suspect
> drive.

dd generally works with healthy drives but I've not had great
luck with it when even one sector is bad, so I've been using
dd_rescue (Debian pkg is named ddrescue, RPM equiv unknown)
which has features intended for such situations and seems a
bit more resilient.

Copying NTFS partitions in this manner is, um, fraught - it
seems to mostly work most of the time but I suspect NTFS has
something like hardcoded absolute block numbers somewhere that
can occasionally trip you up when making bit-for-bit copies.
I might expect that for stuff like system files (a la GRUB) and
such, but regular files seem also to get b0rken occasionally.

The Debian package "ntfsdoc" (RPM equiv unknown) provides some
good NTFS background info rooted at /usr/share/doc/ntfsdoc,
though the geniuses who did the HTML layout declare, "To
make the documentation easier to read, most links are not
underlined."  Fortunately, the Zap-Annoyances and Disable-CSS
bookmarklets(*) make the info readable.

The same people also run this WWW site:

   http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php

...which may be better - I couldn't find the same info that
was in the ntfsdoc pkg there but I might not have been looking
in the right place.







(*)Bookmarklets rock!  https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/