>>>>My sister's HP has been sending out ominous "drive about to fail"
>>>>messages.  She asked me to help replace her drive.  I did what I
>>>>normally do:  after adding the new drive, I booted the system in Knoppix
>>>>to try to do the copy.  The problem was the 5 GB "recovery" partition at
>>>>the beginning of the disk.  Knoppix could not recognize this.  The same
>>>>held true for Seagate's setup utility, which boots with DR-DOS (the
>>>>replacement drive is a Seagate.)  Does anybody know what kind of file
>>>>system the Evil Empire uses for this partition?  Secondly, is it now
>>>>safe to use Linux to copy NTFS files?  My version of Knoppix is 3.3 and
>>>>I've since downloaded 4.0, but I don't want to drive back to my sister's
>>>>house unprepared.  Is there a good Linux tool to do this?
>>>
>>>
>>>Most likely that is either a norton ghost image or a drive image image 
>>>at the head of the drive.  As for copying NTFS... well I would think a 
>>>dd image of the drive would survive without issues, then use an NTFS 
>>>safe application like PQMagic to expand the NTFS drive to fill the 
>>>remainder of the new volume.

>>I'll second that.
>>
>>dd just copies whatever's there, so I'd expect that it would copy the 
>>recovery partition and the NTFS partition just fine. just "dd 
>>if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1k" to copy the whole drive (after booting a 
>>live CD, with no partitions on the drives mounted). Be sure to use the 
>>appropriate designations for the drives as you have them installed.
>>
>>(I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.)
>>
> 
> 
> I'm not sure I would try to copy everything with partition table (although as
> far as I know, as long as the new disk is larger it might work.)  I would
> create partitions on the destination drive, then use dd on each one, then
> expand partitions if needed.

The problem with that is that the NTFS partitions might not take too 
kindly to being in a space larger than they say they should be.  Fat and 
Fat32 might not be a problem though...
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