captive and dd not working

[nthwolf]

Greetings all,

Couldn't figure out which forums to post this to since it covers a few different things. I've got the book Knoppix Hacks. I thought it was a pretty good book and I was excited about copying my windows partition. That's where I ran across problems.

I'm booting from the Knoppix CD that came with the book and my computer has windows installed on the hard drive and I have 1GB of RAM(more on why I mention the RAM later).

I've got a hard drive with 3 NTFS partitions. I want to copy partition 1 (hda1) to a directory in partition 2 (hda2 but it's being detected as hda5). From my understanding of the book I have to run captive to be able to write to an NTFS partition.

I tried running captive and it would spontaneously close out on me. I then skipped the first screen that comes up and had it search the ms service pack thing. I had more luck with that but it would still throw error messages at me. I don't have the error messages written down because I figure if I can get by with captive partially working then dd is my problem.

So, after running captive, I mount hda5 so I can write to that NTFS partition. Here's the command I used:

sudo mount -t captive-ntfs -o uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix /dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5

After mounting hda5 so I can write to it I type this command:

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/hda5/temp/os-backup.img

I get impatient and want to watch the progress so i open another terminal up and type:

watch ls -l /mnt/hda5/temp/os-backup.img

Numbers flash on the screen. I get excited because I feel like I'm almost getting the hang of this. A while later the numbers stop moving and I see that I get the > in the original terminal that I typed dd in meaning I can type something else there now if I wanted to.

I check the terminal with the watch command and see some big number starting with 4. I get excited because there are a lot of numbers and assume that it's 4GB. Yes, I took basic math in school and I must have gotten too excited because when I went back to windows I found out that the file was only 400MB and not 4GB. 4GB is about the amount of space that the windows install took up on main partition of the hard drive.

Here are my thoughts on what might have happened.

It wrote just what was remaining in my RAM which I'm assuming is around 400MB?

I didn't unmount hda5 before closing down Knoppix?

PEBKAC so I'm screwed since I can't change that.

Any help would be appreciated and I apologize if this was the wrong forum to post this to.

edit: forgot to add that hda1 is 7GB with ~3GB free and hda5 is 35GB with ~20GB free

[nthwolf]

anyone? please? hehe

[UnderScore]

I've got a hard drive with 3 NTFS partitions. I want to copy partition 1 (hda1) to a directory in partition 2 (hda2 but it's being detected as hda5). From my understanding of the book I have to run captive to be able to write to an NTFS partition.

You want to copy the partition down to the bitlevel of the filesystem? Or you want to copy the contents of hda1 to another location? Sounds similar but very different.

Lets see if I understand this:
You have a C: drive hda1 7GB with about 3GB free formatted with NTFS
You have a D: drive hda5 35GB with 20GB free also formatted with NTFS
You want to copy the contents of C: to a folder on D
Do you have complete physical access to another PC running Windows 2000 or higher? If so, then skip Knoppix and put your current HD as slave in the other PC. Boot the PC up into Windows and copy the the desired files to the desired location.

[nthwolf]

Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear. I have 1 hard drive that's 80GB. That 80 GB drive has 3 partitions. The first partition is 7GB and has windows xp installed on it. The second partition is 40GB and has programs installed on it. The third partition is the rest of the space with miscellaneous stuff stored on it.

I want to boot into Knoppix with the live CD from the book so I can copy the windows partition into a backup directory on the second partition. I then want to burn that backup of the windows partition in case I ever need to reinstall windows again. I can then just copy the partition back over and not have to sit through a long windows install.

I can't boot into windows and copy that partition because certain files will still be in use while windows is running making it almost impossible to copy the windows directory.

So my solution was to follow the instructions in the book by booting into Knoppix and using captive to allow me to write to an NTFS drive and the dd command to copy the whole windows partition.

Anyone have any ideas why captive is acting weird and dd is only copying 400MB? I would greatly appreciate the help.

[Harry Kuhman]

Captive doesn't work.

[UnderScore]

Captive does not work so well if at all.
Your best bet is to skip Knoppix/Captive and use Windows to do the copying. Use another HD or use another PC that you have access to. Put your current HD as slave in the other PC. Then boot the other PC up into Windows and copy the the desired files to the desired location. Then remove the HD and place it back into the original computer.

[nthwolf]

So captive doesn't work.

What about the fact that when I used dd it only copied 400MB?

[thejonreally]

Ok this applies to Knoppix 3.6, I'm still trying to work out where the heck Captive is on 3.9 (it IS there right guys ?? you wouldnt drop Read/Write ntfs support surely ???).

Captive is broken slightly in 3.6 but its very easy to fix - no recompiles or anything don't panic!

I'm afraid I owe credit here to 'Pete', whoever he is - Pete, I thank you! These are his words below.

Jon


from:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=60253
or same:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=ca...nt+hangs&hl=en

Solution! for V3.6-2004-08-16

The problem is that the user "captive" and group "captive" have been removed
accidentally in V3.6. One has to recreate them; I copied settings from
KnxV3.4-2004-05-17-EN for use in procedure below.

Penguin Menu:Root Shell
passwd
(set to your choice)

KDE Menu:System:KUser
(enter passwd)
OK
Adduser Button: captive
userID: 108 (same as v3.4)
login shell: /bin/false
home folder: /var/lib/captive
uncheck all three boxes (in reverse order to avoid greying out)
Groups Tab
Primary Group: nogroup
OK
AddGroup Button:
Group name: captive
Group number: 116 (not same as V3.4, but close by.)
SAVE
Dialog 'no shadow entry for captive': OK

Penguin Menu: Utilities:Captive NTFS
Follow menu directions; get XP drivers from your hard drive, or download them;
Win 2k drivers won't work.

Penguin Menu:Root Shell
mkdir /mnt/hda1 (or whatever you like)
mount -t /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Lastly, there's couple in's and out's for accessing the drive:
I edited the lines in /etc/fstab to look like: (changed ntfs to captive-ntfs
and ro to rw)

# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 captive-ntfs
noauto,users,exec,rw,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=kno ppix 0 0

Next, right clik on kde desktop icon:Propertiesevice:uncheck Read Only
Now you can open the drive by clicking this icon in Konqueror and read/write
as you like.

Lastly, REMEMBER to unmount the drive before quitting or your changes may be
lost and not copied from the sandbox data area to be written to the hard
drive.


Good Luck,
Pete

[UnderScore]

Ok this applies to Knoppix 3.6, I'm still trying to work out where the heck Captive is on 3.9 (it IS there right guys ?? you wouldnt drop Read/Write ntfs support surely ???).

Captive NTFS has been removed from recent versions. Development of captive ntfs stalled and at the last time I checked, it had not been updated in a year. Since it interfaces with the kernel level filesystem drivers, it needs to be kept up to date. That and from the many problems reports, it seems to have never been reliable.

Practically all of us here are not Knoppix developers but are just community volunteers. You could ask the developers about inclusion of captive ntfs at their mailing list at http://sympa.linuxtag.net/wws.

[thejonreally]

Ok this applies to Knoppix 3.6, I'm still trying to work out where the heck Captive is on 3.9 (it IS there right guys ?? you wouldnt drop Read/Write ntfs support surely ???).

Captive NTFS has been removed from recent versions. Development of captive ntfs stalled and at the last time I checked, it had not been updated in a year. Since it interfaces with the kernel level filesystem drivers, it needs to be kept up to date. That and from the many problems reports, it seems to have never been reliable.

Interesting, I have never had a single problem with the version I am using with Knoppix 3.6, but then I have never tried to use it as a permanent drive mount. It works fine for recovering work and re-writing files. Also anything to do with Windoze is notorious for the 'Two Worlds' problem - half the people get no problems at all while the other half can't ever get it to work.

This is worrying, the future is looking like we'll have to go with something like vmware and SMB mount ext3 drives because nobody will be able to read and write NTFS volumes.

Practically all of us here are not Knoppix developers but are just community volunteers. You could ask the developers about inclusion of captive ntfs at their mailing list at http://sympa.linuxtag.net/wws.

Thanks for that, I'm a little puzzled by the focus of these forums but I have just subscribed to that mailing list, so cheers.

Jon