DD question - copy to a larger drive & then back to original?

[mr_fusion_512]

I've got a couple of Tivo's who's hard drives have gotten a lot of bad sectors (verified when I pulled them out to test on a bootable seagate cd)... but the drives are still under warranty and I figured to replace them now while I can.

Here's the thing, they don't make these drives any more (seagate PATA DB35 750GB's) and identical ones are VERY expensive so that kills the plan of buying one like it, doing the dd, testing it and then replacing the bad one "later". Instead I figured that I would try replacing it temporarily with a 1 TB sata drive and using a PATA-SATA adapter (the ones sold by Weaknees, just cause i know it'll be compatible)

I'm not intending to upsize it or make the new drive permanent, I just want to be able to copy my current drive to the new one, so I can get the bad one replaced while being able to use the Tivo while I'm waiting and then later copy everything back to the replacement drive (presumably identical model to the current one).

So the question is that if I use DD to copy from my 750GB PATA drive to a 1TB SATA (via PATA adapter, just to be safe?), when the replacement drive comes in, can I reverse the process and DD it from that 1TB SATA back to the 750GB PATA?

Also, does the same apply to dd_rescue? (never used it, just noticed it mentioned here and there). I'm guessing I may possibly have issues on regular DD given that the current drive has a ton of known bad sectors.

Thanks!
-Jason

[ronsch]

Off the top of my head I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work. I wouldn't necessarily depend on getting an identical drive back as a replacement. You might be better off using the 1 TB sata drive and expanding it to use all the space with MFSLIVE.

[mr_fusion_512]

Are you referring to using MFSCopy in WinMFS? I wasn't aware that re-expanding from the 750 to 1 TB was even an option guess I can try that first although I'm not sure how well MFSCopy will handle bad sectors?

thanks!

[ronsch]

Originally Posted by mr_fusion_512

Are you referring to using MFSCopy in WinMFS? I wasn't aware that re-expanding from the 750 to 1 TB was even an option guess I can try that first although I'm not sure how well MFSCopy will handle bad sectors?

thanks!

No, I'm saying use dd_rescue to copy the drive and then use MFSLIVE to expand into the additional 250GB. It may require a beta version of MFSLIVE to expand a drive that has reached it's maximum partition limit.

[mr_fusion_512]

Originally Posted by ronsch

No, I'm saying use dd_rescue to copy the drive and then use MFSLIVE to expand into the additional 250GB. It may require a beta version of MFSLIVE to expand a drive that has reached it's maximum partition limit.

Thanks for the clarification. Right now, however, I'm trying my luck with WinMFS/MFSCopy (4 hours to go on a 750 GB) and see if that'll work in spite of the bad sectors (I figure I already started down that path so I'll wait till it finishes or fails miserably). I'll post an update afterwards, tho, thanks!