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I have an unfragmented raw image of my laptop's hard drive stored on an external hard drive (created with ftk imager which just makes a raw .001 file, not through windows to make a .iso file). My laptop's hard drive has failed. I have replaced my laptop's hard drive with an identical one. But I haven't been able to figure out how to actually get the image from the external drive onto the new laptop drive. Here's what I have tried:

1) I have booted the laptop with a windows repair disk. I can navigate to the external drive through the command prompt, but the window's repair utility cannot get to the external drive; prompts lead to a request to install drivers. Standalone Drivers are not available for my external drive--they seem to only be incorporated into executables.

2) I have plugged the new hard drive and the external hard drive into a third computer. I can see that both the raw image and the new drive are the same size. But the new drive was formatted, so I can't just move the raw image onto the new drive--I get a warning about needed around 100 MB more space.

Any help or points to other posts are appreciated. Searches so far lead me to cloning, the window's recover option, or linux recover. I might not be using the correct search terms. If there are simple commands that accomplish this from the dos command prompt accessible from the windows repair cd boot, that would be great to know also.

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  • That software is for computer forensics, not intended as a image backup to restore an image.
    – Moab
    Sep 29, 2015 at 21:03
  • So am I out of luck? I was hoping there was a way to write the raw image to the new drive and have the computer recognize it as the bootable drive through use of the command prompt (i.e., without other special utility programs).
    – Docuemada
    Sep 29, 2015 at 21:55
  • Looks like you have a possible answer below.
    – Moab
    Sep 29, 2015 at 23:46

2 Answers 2

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If the image is just a bit-for-bit copy (which is commonly the case for images, and the size difference sounds right considering the space a formatted NTFS volume loses to volume metadata) you need to write the image back to the disk. The best way I know of to do this is to use a tool from Linux's dd family. Any Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB) distro will include dd.

Be sure to read the manpage (man dd) before using dd; it's an old command with somewhat non-standard parameters. Here's an example that is close to what you'd need:

dd if=/mount/external/myhdd.001 of=/dev/sda /bs=4M

What that does:

  • Read from the file /mount/external/myhdd.001, which should be replaced to the path to your image file on the external HDD. Linux should be able to read the external USB HDD unless it does something very odd, but you may need to mount the drive if the OS doesn't do so for you. (The mount point of /mount/external is just an example, it can be whatever you want.)
  • Write the read-in data to the raw block device /dev/sda, which is the first persistent storage drive that the OS (Linux) sees. There may be a few /dev/sd* devices; make sure you get the right one (but an internal HDD will almost always be sda. This command will overwrite everything on the target, unrecoverably! Note that you aren't writing the image file to the filesystem on the disk; the image includes your original file system, so the whole image is being written to the disk, after which the disk will contain a file system.
  • The last parameter just sets the block size that dd uses for copying to 4MB. The default size is pretty tiny (old tool, used to be used on machines with a pittance of RAM), which wastes a lot of time telling the kernel to do tiny reads and writes. The larger buffer just makes things faster.
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  • This worked well, thank you. And for those like me without any linux experience, I found the commands df-h useful in identifying my drives. The raw image was in a file directory, /sdb1/imagename.001 and the internal harddrive had the path /dev/sda
    – Docuemada
    Oct 1, 2015 at 15:05
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If the other answers don't work, you can always do a clean install on your new HD and install the latest FTK imager software on it. After this, mount your old image and restore the software, docs, photo's, movies, etc. you don't want to loose. This way you have at least the most important things back... Good luck!

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  • Good emergency plan, thank you; fortunately, I got it to work!
    – Docuemada
    Oct 1, 2015 at 15:06

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