Knoppix to the rescue

[Michael Hipp]

Someday I'll learn ...

My pastor's daughter's laptop died with a failing hard drive. I managed 
to get it to a state where I could get the data off it, but two 
different commercial partition tools would not allow me to do a direct 
copy of the 30GB hdd to the new 40GB drive. Something to do with some 
trickery Dell is playing with the partition table. The machine would 
never boot the copied drive.

So, my last hope, grab the Knoppix disk, boot it, enter 'dd if=/dev/hda 
of=/dev/hdc' and viola 2 hours later it finishes, stick the new drive in 
and it works perfectly. (Well, to the extend WinXP Home ever works 
perfectly.)

Lesson learned: try the FLOSS tools first, not last.

Michael