rescue hard disk from other suse install

English Hardware
#1

Hi all,

searched on the forums for something related to my problem but nothing specific yet. So I thought I’d post first and consult before potentially frying a much needed hard disk.

I have a 250gb sata hard disk from another computer that I need to recover. The disk is not damaged and already has a full suse11.0 install on it. I just need to recover the data and figured I could mount it on my system at home running suse11.0 as well. I guess the normal way to go about it would be to instal it and make sure it is detected in the bios, then go to yast and pick a new mount point. BUT, would that work with a disk that already has a boot sector and grub installed? The partitions on my home system have a very similar layout to the ones on the disk to recover (hda, hdb, etc.). Could that cause a problem?

Any bored gurus out there interested in this one? :wink:

Z11

#2

You can plug it in, mount and read it just like any other disk.

Or, you can do what the forensics guys do, and not risk mounting it. Use dd to copy entire partitions, which you then scan for nasty words and images.

HTH

#3

yeah I guess there shouldn’t be any problems since the mount process does not read the partition table on the new disk.

dd option seems interesting too. just scan the needed sectors.

thanx