>
> Any modern drives that do this? E.g.? If this is a real concern
> (must be pretty rare as I've never seen it mentioned in dd disk
> mirroring discussions) he could still dd the whole drive if he took
> the precaution of backing up the first xx bytes off the disk being
> copied to. I thought drives were pretty flexible/forgiving, I've
> temporarily made a 6.4 gig drive into a 16meg drive with totally
> wrong settings in bios and it worked fine.
Any modern drivers that do this? Probably not. I'd probably save off
the first 4k or so to a safe place, just to be paranoid, though.
Actually, it's typically something that's done in deference to older
BIOSes, to get around cylinder limits & so forth.
And saving off the first bit "just to be safe" was all I was suggesting
in the first place.
This bit me years ago with my computer-before-last; I wiped out the
start of /dev/hda, and the disk geometry was screwed up. I eventually
managed to reconstruct it, but it was one of those painful memories that
make me gun-shy about such things ever since.
--
"Brian, the man from babble-on" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brian T. Schellenberger http://www.babbleon.org
Support http://www.eff.org. Support decss defendents.
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