0
I have an NTFS hard drive with a dynamic partition, which I believe is on the verge of failure (multiple spin-up retries, drive disappears from "My Computer" in Windows). I have ordered a 1TB drive to replace it, but don't dare connect the failing drive in case it goes kaput. All the really important data is backed up, obviously, however it would be convenient if I could retrieve the medium-importance data on it (which is not backed up), and copy it to the new drive once it arrives.
I was first considering using rsync to do this, but then I realised that the NTFS drive is not mountable in Linux due to it being dynamic.
So what are my options? Is it possible to run
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/newdrive/disk.img
Then somehow (how?) mount disk.img and copy the files back?
Or is there a better method? Note that I do not want to make a simple clone from one drive to the other (for multiple reasons, one being that the new drive is twice the size of the old).
Thanks very much,
Fela
Fela Maslen
Posted 2013-08-19T17:56:45.473
Reputation: 339
Would it be acceptable to clone the drive, and then resize the partition to take up the entirety of the new drive? Copying it to an image on the new drive will be problematic because you'll need a third drive to extract all the files to. – Darth Android – 2013-08-19T18:09:20.930
I would much prefer to make a new partition as it would be cleaner (i.e. not fragmented). I would not need a third drive actually, because the broken drive is 500GB, whereas the new drive is double that. But I have an external drive if the need arises anyway. – Fela Maslen – 2013-08-19T18:27:34.790