use ubuntu to clone a windows hard drive with ntfs

[lancebermudez]

tryed
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /home/custom/user/sda_image.img /home/custom/user/logfile

problem is would not mount under /mnt to see if it worked

so tryed
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /home/custom/user/sda_image.iso /home/custom/user/logfile

the sda_image.img file is 55gb the other one tht is .iso is 0gb

so now trying

dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/custom/usr/sda_image.iso

waiting to see what is going on any body got any advice on how to make the image work?

[Rubberman]

Please say exactly what you are trying to accomplish and I'll try to give you a step-by-step. I do disc imaging of NTFS volumes and Windows system discs (as well as Linux partitions and drives) all the time without problems. Saved my (and my clients') bacon on more than one occasion.

[Mudgen]

I'm sure Rub will walk you through it when you give details, but one thing that's wrong with what you're doing and what you're saying is that if you expect to be able to mount the image, it needs to be of a partition, e.g. /dev/sda1, not the full disk device.

[Rubberman]

I'm sure Rub will walk you through it when you give details, but one thing that's wrong with what you're doing and what you're saying is that if you expect to be able to mount the image, it needs to be of a partition, e.g. /dev/sda1, not the full disk device.

Actually GHW, you can mount a file system that is inside a full disc image. It's just a bit harder. You have to figure the offset of the first block of the partition, and pass that information to the mount command. I've done it, but you are right in that for people who aren't into major brain burn, mounting an image of a partition is tonnes easier!

[Mudgen]

Not the first time I've learned something from your posts. Wasn't aware of that option to a loop mount.

[Rubberman]

Here is the part of the mount man page that covers that.

THE LOOP DEVICE
       One further possible type is a mount via the loop device. For example, the command

         mount /tmp/fdimage /mnt -t vfat -o loop=/dev/loop3

       will set up the loop device /dev/loop3 to correspond to the file /tmp/fdimage, and then mount  this  device  on
       /mnt.

       This  type  of  mount  knows about four options, namely loop, offset, sizelimit and encryption, that are really
       options to losetup(8).  (These options can be used in addition to those specific to the filesystem type.)

       If no explicit loop device is mentioned (but just an option ‘-o loop’ is given), then mount will  try  to  find
       some unused loop device and use that.

       Since  Linux  2.6.25  is supported auto-destruction of loop devices and then any loop device allocated by mount
       will be freed by umount independently on /etc/mtab.

       You can also free a loop device by hand, using ‘losetup -d’ or ‘umount -d‘.

[Mudgen]

Yep, that's the first place I went after seeing your previous response. The actual offset option is documented in the losetup manpage, but it's not immediately clear how to set the option on the mount command line to get it passed to losetup. It's "-o offset" for losetup, but -o is the option switch itself for mount. How do you put the offset into the mount command?

[Rubberman]

mount [-t type] filename mount-point -o loop[=/dev/loopN],offset=NNNNNNN

That's how I did it. Keeping the calculator app handy is good to compute the offset in bytes from the start sector of the partition...

[bobpegram]

tryed
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /home/custom/user/sda_image.img /home/custom/user/logfile

problem is would not mount under /mnt to see if it worked

so tryed
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /home/custom/user/sda_image.iso /home/custom/user/logfile

the sda_image.img file is 55gb the other one tht is .iso is 0gb

so now trying

dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/custom/usr/sda_image.iso

waiting to see what is going on any body got any advice on how to make the image work?

Why not use Clonezilla? It is a one trick pony, but it does cloning easily. You download it and burn it to CD. It makes a boot disk.

[coopstah13]

the offset isn't even technically necessary, one time to fool a dell DRAC device I created a disk image file, create fs on it, and then mounted it on the DRAC and it looked just like a regular usb stick, then i mounted it back on my local machine and everything i copied was there, i just use the -o loop and nothing else

the best part though, was that i just did all this on a hunch and it ended up working