OT: fdisk

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 22:27:02 -0600 (MDT), Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Polytropon wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 10:00:51 -0700, Robert <traveling08 at cox.net> wrote:
> >> I have a spare 250G hard drive. Can I use "dd" to capture 250 gigs
> >> from the old drive? Using da1 and ad12 as the if and of will the result
> >> be an NTFS formatted 250g drive? Will I have the same results, i.e.
> >> able to mount ad12 but not ad12s1?
> >
> > Yes, as dd gives you an 1:1 copy of what you have.
> 
> It will give an exact copy of the first 250G, which also means it will 
> not resize the 500G filesystem into a working 250G version.
> 
> The first step would be a copy of the entire drive.  Then the filesystem 
> can be repaired and resized.

Exactly. NEVER mess with the precious data. Only read, then
store away the drive. If all files are back, the drive can
be cleanly reformatted and then populated with the original
files. All investigation and modification tasks should be
done with a copy. If you mess up a copy, get a new one.

As hard disks are cheap, it might be worth buying a new one
just to have enough disk space available for such tasks.
Remember: Hard disks are cheap, your data isn't. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...