Cannot clone a hard drive

[Wakenaam]

Friends: I am using Knoppix 5.1 to try to clone an internal IDE hard drive to an external USB SATA hard drive. I was using GPARTED to do this using "Copy" and "Paste" commands. Both hard drives show up but I cannot get the "Paste" command to work, as it is always grayed out. Could someone walk me through how to do this? I was also trying to use the DD commands with no better luck. Thanks for any help. Windows XP Pro.

[krishna.murphy]

I assume you mounted the SATA drive by clicking an icon on the desktop. Try right-clicking that same icon and choosing to set the drive to read-write mode, and I think the problem will be resolved.

Cheers!
Krishna

[Harry Kuhman]

.... Windows XP Pro.

krishna is right, the partition that you open will default to read-only unless you force it to be read-write. However, Knoppix does not have a very good history of writing NTFS partitions. Even if it seems like it wrote to NTFS properly, there may be underlying corruption that will come back and get you. I would NEVER write to NTFS with Knoppix, although reading is certainly fine. Writing to NTFS is best done with Windows (and even they don't have a very good track record about it, as seen by so many people who show up here trying to recover their Windows partitions).

[krishna.murphy]

I agree that writing to NTFS with Knoppix 5.1 is problematic. You can choose another fs-type, naturally, since the clone-copy can be made with only fs-independent copy operations. Perhaps another approach would be better, though, since you probably want to access this disk with Windows; there are utilities available that will make a sector-for-sector clone of a drive (that makes t fs-independent.) The right one may depend on the (new) drive manufacturer, if the utility from that manufacturer can be found to do it. There were a number of them on Hiren's BootCD when last I looked at it. Be sure you obtain any licenses required before using any commercial software that may be on there.

One other note re: NTFS - Knoppix 6.2+ uses a more modern and reliable NTFS-writing package. I personally write several (or many) GB on NTFS partitions every week without issues. That isn't to say there are none possible, but if you don't HAVE to use version 5 for hardware compatibility, I'd consider using version 6.2 or above, as there are many advances therein.

Cheers!
Krishna
p.s There is a more error-resistant version of dd out there, which has been discussed in these forums, but I can't think of the name right now. Maybe someone else will remember, or you could try searching with Google, too.