IO access

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/IO access

Smokey(Posted 2006) [#1]
Hi

I have 2 hard disk and I want to copy sector by sector the entire drive to the other I know there serval software that can do this but I don't want to buy something that i will use one or 2 time

I think I can get access to drive by calling dll , I wonder if someone have done this or having information doing this

there is no partition, it's not a PC hard drive, It's my tv receiver, the harddrive make noise and I have the same harddrive, same size same model in one of my other computer and I want to exchange the HD , it's why I need to read sector by sector to make the exact copy

Thanks


xlsior(Posted 2006) [#2]
Use at your own risk an all that, but 'Ghost 4 Linux' is free, and can do a raw sector-by-sector disk copy of any drive without needing knowledge of the partition info or anything. You don't actually need to have linux installed, it comes as a bootable CD-image.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l

The destination disk should (obviously) be of equal size or larger than the source drive for it to work properly. You can either clone the entire drive as-is, or on a partition level if the filesystem and paritions are recognized by the program. For a proprietary system like this, your best bet would probably be a complete cloning of the drive.

I've successully used it myself cloning a MIPS-based Cobalt server harddrive on my PC, which is otherwise completely unreadable by a normal PC... But again, use it at your own risk. Success is NOT guaranteed, and I am not responsible if you blow up your harddrive or lose all your data.

to use, download the ISO image, and use a CD-writer tool that can create a CD from an image, like Nero or Roxio Easy CD Creator. If you burn this correctly, you can then boot from your CD-ROM and enter the program. For your own safety, you probably want to disconnect your windows harddrive in your PC during this project, and only have your TV-Receiver drive and the destination drive hooked up to your PC, just so you won't accidentally overwrite your PC's actual harddrive in the process if you select the wrong destination disk.

good luck!


Smokey(Posted 2006) [#3]
Thanks xlsior I'll try this, i saw another software that can do this and the price is 1000$ and more.