I am trying to do a bit for bit copy of one HDD to another same size HDD. The command I am using is dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb conv=notrunc,noerror which I found in these forums somewhere. The problem is that I get a "dd: opening '/dev/hda': Permission denied" error. Both the drives show up on the desktop however I cannot mount the HDA and subsequent partitions. The HDB is mountable. I believe the HDA is using PSOS. This drive comes out of a unit called a Compaq MC-1 and I want a backup so that I can restore it if it dies. Any help would be appreciated.

1 are you running dd command after doing a su or sudo command to bypass any permission issues?
eg su
dd commands or
sudo dd commmands
2 what is is your distro?
3 this is one of the best dd posts you will may wish to read
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506

by AwesomeMachine

No I am a total noob to unix and it's related commands. What is the su or sudo command and what is the proper syntax? I looked through the DD thread and it looks like everything I might ever want to know about DD but I didn't see a reference to the two commands you mentioned. I am using Knoppix because it recognizes both the drives. When I booted FC4 I ran into all sorts of errors and it only saw the secondary drive that I want to copy to, not the source drive.

You need to be root to access drives. So you need to log in as root (with su) or run commands as root (with sudo, if it's set up) somehow.

Nice, the sudo command worked out perfectly. I took quite a while to make the copy but that was expected. You guys are the best. Thanks for all the help.

I'm trying to do a similar thing, but I need to restore a drive image (spanned across several files) onto a NEW partition. I'm told "cat x* | dd of=/dev/sda3" should work, but I get the permission denied error.

Do I have create the permission first before I use dd on it? If so how do I know what size partition to create?

Logomachist

assuming you have not used some kind of drive image software...if so name it pls?

try moving those files onto one partition and then try

this is a longer way of doing it but might show up any errors in my thinking....I have not tested this technique