Complete HD copying

This might not be the right newsgroup to ask this question. (If so, perhaps
someone will point me in the right direction.)

Suppose I want to make a complete copy of a hard disk, including the
fragments of deleted files. Does this require some special process, or will
an ordinary mirror image copying (like Ghost) do the trick?

If a special process is required, how expensive is it?

Thx

Previously Rob Dale <rdale31 DeleteThis @hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> This might not be the right newsgroup to ask this question. (If so, perhaps
> someone will point me in the right direction.)

> Suppose I want to make a complete copy of a hard disk, including the
> fragments of deleted files. Does this require some special process, or will
> an ordinary mirror image copying (like Ghost) do the trick?

They do usually only copy allocated space. Some may have an option to
copy everything.

> If a special process is required, how expensive is it?

Zero. Burn a knoppix CD-only Linux and use dd_rescue (in a
shell) to copy:

dd_rescue <source> <target>

If source is a partition, you should create target before using
fdisk/cfdisk/sfdisk in the same size or larger. If it is a whole
disk, make sure target has at least the same number of bytse
source has (a, e.g., 200GB disk mau be a bit larger or smaller
than an different model 200GB disk).

To see what you have in diesks you can use "fdisk -l".
To see the structure of an individual disk, you can use
"fdisk -l <disk", e.g. "fdisk -l /dev/hda" for the first
IDE disk, "fdisk -l /dev/sdb" for the second SATA disk,
etc.

Arno