david wrote, > > I need to know *exactly* where the partition lies. Is it the whole > > disk? It seems to me that there's a tiny bit left for some reason, > > that isn't used in the partition. And since I only get one shot at > > this, if I lay the partition wrong . . .
> I'm not sure what your problem is, because I've just used zip disks > as if they were fixed, with the same tools. I'm hoping you haven't > screwed the low-level formatting, though. me too :) THe drive suddenly failed. If you insert a zip disk, it tries to mount, but clobbers the partition table. Hopefully not the rest of the disk :( I think i recovered a pair of ext2fs disks, so it should be ok. > > Hmm, can I use dd to make a copy of the disk even though it has no > > partition table? As in > > > > dd if=/dev/sda of=zipback > Yes, though I'd add bs=512 to that command. But I'm not sure why you > want to make a copy of *that* disk (i.e. the "faulty" one). Why not > use dd to copy a good disk to a file, then copy the file to the faulty > one and you'll end up with a clone, partition 4 and all. Because I don't have a good disk with the data I need. This disk was the backup of the dark side installation that came on my laptop. It turns out that i need it rather than drdos to access the sound software. But true to murphy, the backup got clobbered. I want it back :) And I want more than one shot at getting it back. I'm assuming that dd will do a low level copy of the whole disk, junk and all, so that i get more than one shot at fixing it. rick --
