[Gllug] Cygwin confusion...

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

I have customers HD which is on it's last legs, SMART is reporting it's
used up its reallocated sector allowance. There looks to be a fair bit
of logical damage so I can't just copy off the pertinent folders I'm
going to have to image it.

No problem under normal circumstances however I can't boot into Linux
with this device attached, the kernel panics and I get no further, this
happens with Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and Mint 9.04. It's an IDE drive so I
can't start the machine then plug it in. Happily however XP can boot
with it attached, although the logical damage is such it cannot read the
volume and I don't want to let it run scandisk on it until I have an
image of the whole drive.

I have tried dd for windows but this is missing the "error=no" option
and because there are bad sectors it can only get so far before falling
over. So I set about finding a build of ddrescue for windows but the
only one I could find requires cygwin:
http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/windows/cygwin/release/ddrescue/

Fair enough, I installed that and copied the cygwin1.dll to the same
folder as the .exe and it runs BUT...

A) I'm not sure how to reference the drives in windows, fdisk -l doesn't
work as cygwin doesn't seem to have fdisk and ls /dev at the cygwin
prompt only shows half a dozen devices, none of them a hard drive: "fd
mqueue shm stderr stdin stdout". Do I need to use the
\\?\Device\HardDiskVolume3 style syntax here?

B) I'd like to keep the 55Gb (of the 80Gb disk) dd was able to do before
falling over as it took about 15hrs to get that far and this drive is
clearly living on borrowed time. Is there a way I can get it to extend
the partial image I already have?

Thanks,

Roger.
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