I'm trying to clone two HD partitions from a defective drive. I have no backups, so I have to get it right the first time. I'd like to get someone to give me a sanity check.

I have a dual boot HD (via GRUB) with the first partition NTFS (130GB, Windows XP professional) and a small ext3 (<1GB, RHEL 4) partition. The rest of the disk is unformatted and for now I don't care about it. I plan to use "dd" from linux to clone the first partition and probably Clonezilla to do the rest. The first partition has so many bad sectors, Clonezilla won't work on it. I cloned the first (ntfs) partition to an partition sized exactly the same on an external USB (/dev/sdb1) HD via "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512 conv=noerror,sync count=287413957" (I don't have my notes in front of me, so the count value may be off)", but when I look at /dev/sdb1 via GParted, it doesn't see the cloned partion on the external USB drive as NTFS, rather as inidentified.

Maybe my thinking is naive, but shouldn't the cloned partition show up as NTFS? Also, is my approach on the right track?

Thanks

You copied the partition but not the partition table. The ID is in the table.

[Edit for more info] Are you on the right track? Hard to know, dd will copy bad with good, so it might not do what it is you want. NTFS partitions are finicky about being moved, so it may become unbootable. It's unfortunate that you have no backup; I'd probably move as much data off the drive using disk recovery software if necessary, cp if not necessary.

you know I've always used ghost for many years, and tried clonzilla, and ghost for linux, none of them I liked, until I run into partimage, specific the one that comes with systemrescuecd distro I really recommend it, it's really easy to use, I backup all my installations with it