Saikee,

Great thread as always, though I could use your help. I have a drive that is failing on me. My Fedora partition no longer boots and fsck ran overnight without completing. :/

So, I recently purchased a 500GB drive and planned on cloning my main Linux partition (on /dev/sdb3) over to this drive. The layout is like so (after creating/formatting a 250GB partition on /dev/sdc):

Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 400.0 GB, 400088457216 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2b7a2b79

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       48640   390700768+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000ebf86

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1        8355    67111506   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2            8356        8486     1052257+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3            8487       24421   127997887+  83  Linux
/dev/sdb4           24422       30401    48034350    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5           24422       30401    48034318+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x93c8bb99

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1       30394   244139773+  83  Linux
What I would like to do is to copy /dev/sdb3 over to /dev/sdc1. So I booted up the Ubuntu install on /dev/sdb5, mounted sdb3 and sdc1, and then tried the following:

Code:
$ cd /media/sdb3
$ tar cf - . | ( cd /media/sdc1; tar xf -)
It doesn't work, and the terminal output shows the following:

Code:
tar: ./var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/javaws: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: ./var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/jstat: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: ./var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/jmap: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: ./var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/ControlPanel: Cannot open: No such file or directory
It displays this same message for every file on the entire sdb3 partition. I'm not sure why it would say that either -- clearly the files exist! Did I miss something here?