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i need to reformat a windows drive but i want to keep the old one, i have a 2Tb removable hard drive to copy the old one to but i can't open the old drive or do anything with it on my copy of open suse. it just says failure to read ntfs. i am new to Linux so i don't know what i am doing anyone know how i can copy this? any questions ask.

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Use dd to copy the entire partition into a file.

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/media/storage/harddrive.ntfs bs=32M
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Uhh do i change anything? like put the drives name in? and where to put it? – blood Nov 28 '10 at 22:22
You'll have to point if at the appropriate device node to read from, and of at the filename you want to store the image in. As always, man is your friend. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Nov 28 '10 at 22:24
so like dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=FreeAgent GoFlex/oldharddrive/harddrive.ntfs bs=32M (sorry idk how to do "if" one the harddrive is named frost and my new harddrive is "freeagent goflex" and i want it in file oldharddrive) – blood Nov 28 '10 at 22:29
Running fdisk -l as root will let you see all partitions on all drives, which can help you pick out the value for if. The space in your of will need to be escaped somehow. of='FreeAgent GoFlex/oldharddrive/harddrive.ntfs' – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Nov 28 '10 at 22:31
Absolute path to 'fdisk' is '/sbin/fdisk', so running it may require superuser privileges (eg. root). sorry i am really noob with linux :| i ran fdish -1 but what do i do with it – blood Nov 28 '10 at 22:41
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