Newbie mystified by Terminal readout

[dumblux]

Hi all. I've just finished installing Ubuntu Mate 18.04.2 to its own 30GB partition on an 80GB IDE drive.
Win7 is on the other half of the drive. Either system will boot from the GRUB menu.

My initial aim was solely to use a Linux-based GDDRescue to copy data from a failing drive to another, but in the process I've become interested in Linux for my general use, so I'll carry on with it after I finish the data rescue.

The attached pic shows the current state of the computer. I'm puzzled about several of the items. Like the 'loop' and 'squashfs' notations. The 80GB IDE drive - 'sda' - is clear enough, though I'm not sure what 'sda3' is. I guess the other IDE listing - sro - is the CD\DVD optical drive

The two 250GB drives - sdb and sdc - are connected (slaved) to SATA ports on the Asus P5GD1 Pro motherboard. These drives aren't the ones I'll be cloning - they're only there so I can trial the DDRescue process.

My question is mainly about preparing one of the 250GB drives as a target for the data copy from the other. Should I delete all data from it? Delete its partition\s so that the drive is 'unallocated'? Reformat it (NTFS)?

And if so, how is this done via Terminal? Or is there a Linux equivalent of AOMEI Partition Assistant?

I guess I could just reboot into W7 and do this preparation, but I'd rather do it the 'Linux way' if I can.

Advice would be much appreciated

 

[dos2unix]

A lot of questions .. that's good.

squashfs is just a compressed file system.

loop is typically used to mount a "virtual" file system (usually just to RAM/memory).

For example I could use "mount -o loop fedora-30.iso /mnt" to mount an iso on the file system to a mount point. Usually these are "read only" file systems.

sda is a phyical drive. (WDC800)
sdb is also a physical drive. (ST3250)
sdc is also a physical drive. (WDC2500)

sda1, sdc2, sda3, and sda5 are partitions on the sda hard drive. (WDC800)

sdb1 is a partition on the sdb hard drive. (ST3250)

I see that most of your partitions are formatted with NTFS (Windows file system)
but it looks like sda5 is formatted with ext4 (a Linux file system)

I would say the two most popular file system formats for Linux are currently xfs and ext4 .
(but there are others)

You can also do something called LVM, and create "logical" volumes, but that is a more advanced topic.

In your case /dev/sr0 is the cdrom drive.

 

[Vrai]

I think f-disk will do what you want to prepare the drive via terminal. But I would use GParted - a GUI application which works wonderfully. Probably similar to AOMEI Partition Assistant (AOMEI may actually be using Linux apps to perform it's functions).
I would partition and format the 250G destination drive first - prior to copying data to it. Just one big partition. Which file system to format it to may depend on the source disk drive. I'm no expert but I would probably make the destination disk drive the same file format as the source.

 

[dumblux]

dos2unix: Thanks for the info. So 'squashfs' is like zip or rar? OK.
Vrai: Well put. GParted sounds like a plan. Would I do the 'sudo apt' thing to install it?
You think to partition and format, then? OK. BTW, both disks are ex-Windows, so they're NTFS.
One thing I'm not sure about the copy\clone process: GDDRescue apparently expects both source and target drives to be exactly the same size, to a byte. But these drives are from two different manufacturers, so it's possible they could be slightly different sizes. Guess I won't know until I try it