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Retrieving files from a non-bootable hard drive

fr flag

I have a non-bootable drive from my laptop. I'm using Ubuntu on a USB stick to retrieve the files. I'm using Ubuntu instead of Windows because it allows me to see and retrieve hidden files (e.g. Microsoft Outlook .pst files).

My Ubuntu USB drive is an 8GB drive formatted FAT32. The drive I am retrieving the files from is a 250GB NTFS-formatted drive. The drive I am copying to is a 4TB NTFS-formatted external drive.

I can see all of the files I want to retrieve, and the Outlook files are quite large at 15GB+. They seem to want to copy, but always fail. I am using the file explorer app within Ubuntu to do the copying. I have not used the dd command as I am not familiar with that. I know that there is a restriction on FAT32 of 4GB, but I'm not sure if that is an issue because I am copying from and to NTFS drives.

I would appreciate any help I can get to recover these large files.

Thanks in advance for any and all assistance.

in flag
So long as you are not copying files larger than 4GB to the FAT32 partition, then you’re fine. NTFS⇢NTFS should not be an issue so long as the target drive is in a proper “clean” state (meaning the drive was properly unmourned from Windows). What error message(s) are you seeing when a copy fails? Please [edit] your question with the exact message(s)
Nmath avatar
ng flag
`cp` is probably better to use than `dd`. Try to use `cp` and if it doesn't work, please edit your question with the command you used and the complete output. You can use [code fences](https://askubuntu.com/editing-help#code) so that we can parse the output and tell it apart from the surrounding text.
NotTheDr01ds avatar
vn flag
*"but always fail"* - Can you provide more details on what happens? Error messages you see, etc.?
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