ntfs-3g question
 

Copied two ntfs partitions from the 500G system drive to partitions on an external drive with dd for backup so that the system drive could be restructured. With gparted the restructuring went without incident allowing the VISTA system drive to be enlarged as desired. A new data partition was created on the system drive. After transferring the data partition with dd from the external drive it could not be read by VISTA. VISTA disk manager shows both the partitions on the external drive and on the system drive as "raw"

Fedora sees the partitions as ntfs with no problem. The correct code for the partition shows from fdisk.

Formating the data partition with VISTA and using cpio from Fedora accomplished the task of restoring the data but left the question as to what is missing from the copy with dd that flags the partition as "raw" and is there any way to get it corrected. If there had been a problem with resizing the VISTA system partition it would be lost.

Robert McBroom

theoretically ntfs can only be handled properly by native nt based os, all the linux implementations have some limitations, not all the original features were included. One of these missing features is the "handling" of such relocation - which is not supported by default. The ntfs-3g driver can handle it, but the original windows driver supposes some connection between the filesystem and the underlying hardware. In your case this assumption was not "fulfilled", so windows refused to handle it as a valid ntfs filesystem.