I assume that it must have a partition table and be mounted. I cannot, however, access and read the external disk. In the event of trouble with the main disk I should be able simply to exchange it for the external disk and carry on from the point at which I made my last back-up. I now have a back-up which, being identical to the main disk, should, I assume, be bootable. Checking 'dd's resulting report showed what appeared to be a perfect copy. The main disk was bit-copied (cloned) to the external disk at roughly 20Gb per hour, meaning that my 80Gb disk was copied in just under 4 hours. A bit more Net browsing led me to try the command 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb'. RedoBackup failed to recognize the external disk.ĥ. EaseUS acknowledged the latter but crashed the whole computer when instructed to perform the clone. Neither utility was prepared to write to the external disk. Attempts to clone/back-up the main disk to the external disk using the recommended tools EaseUS Todo back-up and RedoBackup, booting respectively from appropriate USB memory sticks, both failed.
'df' ignores the second hard drive, reporting only the main disk.Ĥ. 'dmesg' also correctly identified the external disk as sdb, reporting its type and the USB port to which it is connected.ģ. Nevertheless, 'fdisk' correctly reported its size, number of heads and cylinders, etc.Ģ. At the point of first connection the external drive was essentially a 'bare metal' device, having had its data wiped.
doesn't contain a valid partition table.” This was hardly surprising. 'fdisk' 'saw' both the main drive, as sda, and the USB drive, as sdb, respectively but initially noted that the latter, “. Installing a SATA hard disk, identical to my computer's main drive, in a USB 2.0 caddy and attaching this to the computer resulted in qualified recognition. My attempts to back-up to an external hard disk finally met with apparent success but I cannot now mount the target drive.ġ.