While at work today I came up against a booting (to a fashion) Windows XP laptop that had the symptoms of a failing hard disk. Lots of disk errors in the log etc.. My first thought was to backup the data but unfortunately due to disk corruption some of the files wouldn’t copy across. We tried to use CloneZilla with the rescue option enabled to clone the data but even this failed with many read errors. Steve Courtney suggested using DDRescue from a live CD to see if it could copy the data to a new disk.

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I needed a way of backing up my girlfriends Windows Vista laptop as it looked like it had a hardware fault. There are a few live CD’s that will automatically create backup images for you but the techie in me needed to know how to do it manually. (gotta do it the hard way!)

For backing up I used Knoppix 6.4.4 Live CD as it’s a good all round Linux live CD with great driver and software support including an xdesktop. Knoppix can be downloaded from here: http://www.knoppix.org/The software to do the actual backing up is DD which does an exact bit copy of the source disk. To compress the image the process used Gunzip. In this instance the destination disk is a 2TB external disk drive formatted as NTFS. If you’re using FAT32 or another file system, section 5 will need to be adjusted accordingly. Continue reading →

Recently I have been bookmarking a lot of the pages i”ve used for research. Its incredibly annoying when you require a bookmark you saved on your work machine when working for home. Xmarks is a little utility that allows you to sync bookmarks and other browser data between all browsers you work with.Its a great bit of software and does the job nicely.

The software can be downloaded here: http://www.xmarks.com/