Cygwin dd of='\\.\PhysicalDrive0' Invalid argument

windows-7 cygwin

I'm trying to copy my hard drive. unxutils dd that used to work before, now doesn't.

So I'm trying the Cygwin version. It reads just fine, but can't open for writing:

$ dd if='\\.\PhysicalDrive0' count=0
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 4.4131e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

$ dd if=/dev/null of='\\.\PhysicalDrive0'
dd: opening `\\\\.\\PhysicalDrive0': Invalid argument

You may need to use

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc

where sdc is whole drive that you want to be zeroed. Check that you are sure that you are zeroing right drive. sdc is the third whole drive, sdc2 is the second partition on the third drive (contains boot sector if it is there). Cygwin uses standard *nix terminology for local drives. You may want to use pv (pipe viewer, it is available in Cygwin) to see the progress:

pv /dev/zero > /dev/sdc

This works:

dd if=/dev/null of='\\.\PhysicalDrive0' conv=notrunc,nocreat

Upd: Cygwin has an alias /dev/sda for PhysicalDrive0 and so forth and opening it like this does not require conv flags

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