[Wlug] Using Knoppix to copy an NTFS drive

[Jamie Guinan]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Chuck Noyes wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a drive that sounds like it's about to fail (making strange
> noises and occasionally not booting), so I want to copy it to another 
> identical drive. The drive has 1 NTFS partition on it - I very
> occasionally run Win2k.
> 
> I booted up the 5.0 KNOPPIX CD and tried dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb.
> There were no error messages and after about 30 minutes the 'dd'
> finished. However from KNOPPIX, I can't mount the new drive. the mount
> command (sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1) fails with:
> 
> "Couldn't mount device '/dev/hdb1'. input/output error - mount failed".
> 
> The original drive (/dev/hda1) mounts without any problem.
> 
> If I use the fdisk utility and look at the partition table, there are
> no differences between the hda and hdb drives.
> 
> Any ideas how I can solve this problem??

Hi Chuck,

I don't know what the default block size is for dd, but maybe you 
could try adding "bs=512" to the dd arguments, so that you're copying 
on sector boundaries.  I can't explain why this would help (if it 
does), its just a hunch.  :)

Also, maybe you could you turn off DMA to one or both drives before 
doing the dd.  "hdparm -d0 ..." or something like that.

-Jamie