Quote Originally Posted by j.drake
And, indeed, it was still "running". Cat got me nowhere.
How wrong I was!! I happened to notice that a few folders had been copied, so I tried it again. After a couple more failed attempts - one time copying garbage and another time running out of room on the target disk, I tried running sudo cfdisk to get rid of the partitions that QTParted couldn't delete, and reformatted as one large 80 gig FAT32, and tried cat again. This time, I resisted the urge to abort after several hours, and let it take as long as it wanted. For anyone's future reference, it took well over 24 hours to copy less than 70 GB from one HD partition to another HD.

Thanks to Knoppix, RockMumbles, and especially the great and learned Rickenbacherus, I managed to back up all of my primary drive data, including video files too large to burn to CD, and my HP is bundled up and waiting for FedEx to give it a ride to Cupertino. More importantly, insofar as my wife blamed me and my screwing around with Linux for "breaking" the box, I could come right back at her with the fact that the only thing which saved our otherwise irreplaceable data was Linux, and how fortunate it was that I had learned enough about it prior to the failure, so that I could save our data!! I'm not sure that she bought it, but it sounded good, and she's certainly in no position to dispute it when I have a HD full of our data to show for it. Tux's honor has been defended, and I have you folks to thank for it!!

Now that I've put Linux to a practical use that I could not accomplish with Windows, I feel that I have graduated to the point of being able to call my self a Linux user (albeit a rookie user).

Thanks again,
JD