Cannot see all drives with "fdisk -l"

sheintze · 08-04-2007, 07:21 PM

My daughter has a new notebook running Vista and we wanted to use dd or cp to backup up the drive to a USB HDD. So we installed ubuntu 6.04 on the USB HDD and "fdisk -l" did not see the internal boot drive. Neither did "fdisk /dev/sda -l" or "fdisk /dev/sdc -l" or "fdisk /dev/sdd -l" or "fdisk /dev/hda -l".

So then I tried knoppix 5.1.1: same symptoms!

The ubuntu installation procedure can see the drives however! We had the option of clobbering the vista installation (and did not).
Thanks,
Siegfried

jschiwal · 08-04-2007, 07:29 PM

Did you use sudo to run fdisk as root?

What is the filesystem on the external usb drive. If it is fat32, then remember the 2GB filesize limit. If it is a new drive, you could reformat it. Otherwise, you could use split to break a dd image into slices. Restoring would be a simple matter of cat'ing the files together and piping the output to the dd command.

sheintze · 08-06-2007, 10:44 PM

Thanks! that was the problem!