Anatomy of a hang

[Undertoad]

The xcopy didn't really work. It wound up with a partial copy.... wasn't an exact copy.

Saturday morning, in the shower, it occurred to me that I could probably use Linux to clone the failing drive.

If Windows won't give you the tools, just put the drives on a Linux system!

Saturday afternoon I set up my Linux machine to clone the bad drive. My Linux system is a PC. It boots from SATA. I hooked up two IDE drives - one, master, the failing drive, and two, slave, a drive identical to it.

Then log in as root, and one command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=noerror,sync

Three hours later both 160 GB drives are identical. 250 errors have been bypassed. The system boots from the new cloned drive and chkdsks. Success!! I used Linux to rescue the Windows problem!!

The only way I could have done it smarter, would have been to boot a Linux CD on the original system and run the command from the rescue prompt. Which I could have done, but that would have been so effing smart, it would have been brilliant. I'm not quite there yet.