Complete HD copying

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rob Dale
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Rob Dale

This might not be the right newsgroup to ask this question. (If so, perhaps
someone will point me in the right direction.)

Suppose I want to make a complete copy of a hard disk, including the
fragments of deleted files. Does this require some special process, or will
an ordinary mirror image copying (like Ghost) do the trick?

If a special process is required, how expensive is it?

Thx
 
Previously Rob Dale said:
This might not be the right newsgroup to ask this question. (If so, perhaps
someone will point me in the right direction.)
Click to expand...
Suppose I want to make a complete copy of a hard disk, including the
fragments of deleted files. Does this require some special process, or will
an ordinary mirror image copying (like Ghost) do the trick?
Click to expand...

They do usually only copy allocated space. Some may have an option to
copy everything.
If a special process is required, how expensive is it?
Click to expand...

Zero. Burn a knoppix CD-only Linux and use dd_rescue (in a
shell) to copy:

dd_rescue <source> <target>

If source is a partition, you should create target before using
fdisk/cfdisk/sfdisk in the same size or larger. If it is a whole
disk, make sure target has at least the same number of bytse
source has (a, e.g., 200GB disk mau be a bit larger or smaller
than an different model 200GB disk).

To see what you have in diesks you can use "fdisk -l".
To see the structure of an individual disk, you can use
"fdisk -l <disk", e.g. "fdisk -l /dev/hda" for the first
IDE disk, "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" for the second SATA disk,
etc.

Arno
 
Rob Dale said:
This might not be the right newsgroup to ask this question.
Click to expand...

It is the right group.
(If so, perhaps someone will point me in the right direction.)
Click to expand...
Suppose I want to make a complete copy of a hard disk, including the
fragments of deleted files. Does this require some special process,
or will an ordinary mirror image copying (like Ghost) do the trick?
Click to expand...

You do need to tell Ghost to do a sector copy, by default it wont copy free space.
If a special process is required, how expensive is it?
Click to expand...

Any forensic cloner will do it, they dont cost that much.
 
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