--- On Mon, 6/16/08, Lucy Van Tassel <address@hidden> wrote:
Thanks for the timely response. No, I do not want to copy the source
partition to a file and then mount it. I prefer to copy the source partition
to an identically sized partition on the target drive so that it comes after
the boot partition.
Okay. It's just that the disadvantage of that is if you are not able to make a perfect image, you may end up with a filesystem that is not mountable.
That's not so bad, since you can data-carve files out of it. But once you are
done, you end up with one big honking corrupted filesystem in the middle of your drive. Cleaning up is easier when everything is on one filesystem in one partition.
I imagine I would have to create a fresh partition on
the target drive first, but I do not know how to do this using Linux tools,
and I do not know what size it should be and how to find out the size. (I
would be using a Linux live CD to do it.) Once I have created the target
partition, I know how to copy from the source partition to the target
partition using ddrescue. I have studied its syntax. So I just need help for
the first part of the process.
Just make it bigger than the source drive. You say it's 50 Gigs? Create a 51 Gig partition on the destination drive.
Use the graphical partitioning tool
(Gparted or Qtparted, depending on what live cd you use). You can use parted from the command line, too. You can also use fdisk or cfdisk.
The last one is probably the easiest since it has a straightforward interface.
Assuming your target drive is sdb (do you know what your device is under linux?), run:
sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb
scroll down to the free space and create a new partition. Chose the type (NTFS is 07, I think) and then write it to disk. Quit and you're done.
You don't need to format it since you will be copying the filesystem from the source drive. The filesystem will end up being smaller than the partition, but that doesn't matter.
Andrew.
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