Quote Originally Posted by Markus
When my 40 GB hda drive was starting to sound like a frog I bought a 80 GB to replace it with. hda had only 1 partition, hda1. On the new drive I made several partitions, but I made hda1 slightly over 40 GB. Next I plugged them both in, booted knoppix, su'd to root and gave the command: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 while the new drive was the slave on the cable at hdb.
This leaves out the bootloader so I chrooted and ran lilo, but If you just have windows you need to swap the new drive to master, boot with winCD into recovery console and issue fixmbr. When you then bootup the hd it will probably run scandisk but should work.
I know that dd would work, but it's also inefficient and slow. The fact that I have to back up over the network exacerbates the problem.

Quote Originally Posted by KoD
Another option is to use GHOST, but if the partition is damaged it might not work. I just recovered files from a defective drive using knoppix 3.7 with great results (but extensive period of time). I did it using Samba, Linux to Windows based network utility and just copied the files this way.
I assume you're referring to g4u, not Norton Ghost. From reading its website, it seems to copy everything, just like dd. Also, it seems to be more sensitive to disk geometry; restoring to larger disks may or may not work.

I guess I could go to the store and pick up Norton Ghost, but I'm too cheap.