Cloning old hard drive

[quadrplax]

The hard drive doesn't even show up in the BIOS. In fact, it makes the regular one not show up as well, and swapping which IDE connectors each drive gets does nothing. Also, according to Wikipedia, slitaz is supposed to work in 16MB of ram on one of the settings and 48MB on another, I have 64 to work with.

[sudodus]

I can't help you with the IDE drive. It might be damaged, but let us hope it is only some mismatch in the newer computer.

Yes, but probably there is some other issue with Slitaz, for example some hardware driver. It is still worth trying some of the other really small distros,

DSL, Tiny Core, Puppy. I would guess chances are best with DSL, but of course, I don't know.

[quadrplax]

Both IDE drives work fine in their proper computers. Also, remember my problem is that I wish to clone the drive, and that means there needs to be disk imaging software like dd available on whatever distro I use.

[sudodus]

I just booted it into an old Dell with a Pentium 4 and gave it only 64 MB RAM via the boot option. I entered

dsl mem=64M

You need not do that, let it grab all RAM available!

It runs with network (internet connection), graphical desktop etc, and I checked that dd is available.

I ran it from an old CD with DSL version 4.4.10 with the linux kernel 2.4. You may find some newer version via the internet, but I think all DSL versions are based on 2.4, which is good for compatibility with old hardware. At least you should be able to find a version of DSL based on linux 2.4.

So please try DSL. I think it is the best alternative in this case

[quadrplax]

I booted into DSL 4.4.10 (installed with Universal USB Installer). I got to the DSL logo screen, pressed enter, and nothing happens. I could get to the boot options, and I chose "dsl dma" because I accidently did that thinking it was "dsl 2" (text mode), and it (slowly) booted into the GUI. My question is how to use dd. It's not listed in "help" and when I type it, it goes to a blank line (no "dsl@box:~$") and nothing happens. At this point, if I type anything, it repeats it to me and then presents me with another blank line. So close Any help?

EDIT: "help dd" works, but help isn't that helpful. How do you use "dd" (I would have posted this in Absolute beginners section, but felt I shouldn't do that since it's not Ubuntu.) to clone a hard drive. I tried what a tutorial said:

dd if=/dev/hda conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c  > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz

but it didn't work. It gave the following errors:

dd: invalid number '64K'
bash: /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz: Permission denied

Not sure if I said this, but I'm trying to make the file on the second of 2 flash drives (the first one is for booting DSL) in the PC. I'd like some n00b help

[sudodus]

0. Run dd as root or with sudo

1. Check very carefully that you get the correct drive letters and partition numbers with

sudo fdisk -lu
sudo blkid
df

Try either of these commands (assuming the internal drive (the source) is hda and the target partition is sda1

As root:

Edit: Mount the target drive

mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

dd if=/dev/hda bs=4096 | gzip  > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz

or (the following command is probably slower)

dd if=/dev/hda | gzip  > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz

or with sudo:

sudo -s
mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
dd if=/dev/hda bs=4096 | gzip  > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz
sync
exit

or (the without the bs specifier)

sudo -s
dd if=/dev/hda | gzip  > /mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz
sync
exit

[quadrplax]

Oh, stupid me forgetting about the fdisk command. I forgot to mention that I did do it with sudo before and it didn't work. Anyway, I think I may have broke something. I tried booting again, and accidentally pressed F1 first. This made the F2 or <enter> screen go away for a second and come back. I went to F2, typed "dsl dma" and the cursor went to the next line but nothing happened. I shut down the computer (with the power button) and it froze on the DSL logo screen. Help?

EDIT: nevermind, got it to work by typing in "dsl dma" without pressing F2

[quadrplax]

Ok, I got the error:

bash: /dev/sdb1/hda.img.gz: Not a directory

Here's some information about my situation: I plugged in the DSL drive and booted into it, then I plugged in another flash drive, this one has Ubuntu installed on it (like a HDD, not a Live CD). This one is 16GB. When I do the fdisk command, it shows /dev/sda1 (the DSL drive), /dev/sdb1-3 (the partitions on the 16GB) and /dev/hda1 (the 4GB HDD). No where is anything called /mnt/, it's all /dev/

EDIT: If I go to the /mnt/ directory myself, it shows the partitions (except /dev/sdb3, Linux-swap) I tried the command again, using /mnt even though that's not what it showed, and it said

gzip: Write Error

EDIT2: I went to the /mnt/sdb1 directory in emelFM afterwards. All the partitions were showing up blank before, but now in /sdb1 there is a file "hds.img.gz" but it's only 2.28 Mbytes, and the drive I am cloning has nearly 3GB worth of data

[mips]

You can't write to /dev/sdb1/ as it's not a folder. You need to mount /dev/sdb1 and then write the image file to a folder (under the mount point) in the mounted partition.

[sudodus]

Notice the difference between

/dev/sdb1/hda.img.gz

and the path to the target file in posts #15 and #16

/mnt/sda1/hda.img.gz

So mount /dev/sdb1 on /mnt/sda1

I added two command in post #16 (making the directory /mnt/sda1 and the mounting command).

Please try again