[plug] dd'ing Windows disks

[Derek Fountain]

I had a heart stopping moment yesterday when the 120GB disk in my Windows box 
locked up. I initially thought it was dead, unresponsive as it was to a power 
cycle, but I found that disconnecting it from the IDE bus, then reconnecting 
it made it happy again.

First question: anyone seen that before or know what might be going on?

Nervous because I never managed to work out a backup plan for such a big disk, 
I went to PLE and bought another 120GB drive - from the same manufacturer as 
the old one, although a slightly different model (onboard cache size is 
different). I booted into Knoppix and did a dd from /dev/hda to /dev/hdb. An 
overnight run later and the dd completed.

The weird thing is that the old disk still boots (although Windows barfs 
halfway through the boot process if the second disk is attached as a slave), 
but the new one doesn't. I disconnect the old one, switch the jumpers and 
cables to the new one, and the BIOS tells me there's a disk error and that I 
should press ctrl-alt-del. The BIOS can see the disk, and identifies it 
correctly, so I'm somewhat baffled.

dd'ing from hda to hdb would, I'd have thought, produce an identical copy. The 
fact the BIOS won't boot from the copy suggests that dd has missed something 
which the BIOS needs. Or possibly the disk surface contains a flag which 
relates to the old disk model, which the BIOS reads and disagrees with. Or 
something.

Any ideas, anyone? I'd like a working identical copy of this drive ASAP so if 
the old one fails during the punishment exercise I intend to give it, I can 
just drop the copy into place.

-- 
> eatapple
core dump

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