On Sat, 11 May 2013 21:27:59 +1000, Anthony K wrote: > I'd suggest you still make a copy of the disk with dd and > work on the image! Since I may only get one shot, and since I've never formatted a USB hard drive, nor ever even mounted one, how does this procedure look for my 149GB NTFS disk? Note: Recuva says the cluster size = 4096 & file record size = 1024. 0. {should I boot off a Centos CD or should I use my normal OS?} 1. Connect the new >=150GB hard drive to the Centos 6 laptop Note: Presumably that will be on /dev/sda0 (right?) 2. Format the new hard drive with fdisk (is this step needed?) Note: What fdisk command is recommended? 3. Connect the old 150GB compromised USB NTFS disk to Centos 6 5. Copy data, verbatim, from the old disk to the new disk with dd Key questions: Q0. Should I boot to my normal Centos 6 OS? Q1: Should I format the new USB hard disk with Fdisk? Q2: What dd command should I use? Googling, and looking at fdisk options, should I run? # fdisk /dev/sdb # fdisk -l /dev/sdb Googling, I find multiple dd examples {which block size should I use?} # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M # dd if=/dev/sda of=mbrbackup bs=512 count=1; dd if=mbrbackup of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1