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I am building a new linux computer with a larger hard drive. I thought that I could install my old Western Digital hard drive in my new computer, set my new hard drive as my boot drive and after installing linux copy my home folder to the new drive.

Unfortunately, my old drive is a Western Digital. The "smart drive" firmware interpreted the above as some copyright violation and corrupted the MBR and partition boundaries.

Using testdisk, I can see that my files are still intact, but the drive firmware won't let me repair the damaged MBR and partition boundaries.

Is there a way to copy the files from my old hard drive to the new one?

Testdisk has a "copy files" menu command. Is there a way to copy the files to a different hard drive?

Jim Harris
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  • Use some USB device as a boot device, mount the WD's partition, get your data? -- P.S. What an annoyance. – Run CMD Aug 01 '14 at 09:34
  • I tried that and got an error message that I have an invalid partition table – Jim Harris Aug 01 '14 at 11:52
  • There are many suggestions on how to deal with such a situation, e.g. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=370121 or http://askubuntu.com/q/48717/308343 -- be careful though -- if you have enough storage you might want to make a backup of the raw disk first... – Run CMD Aug 01 '14 at 11:57

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