On May 4, 2007, at 10:04 AM, M H Stein wrote: --------------- From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> One example is the use of a raw partition for, say, a database. This is not uncommon in Oracle installations, for example. From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> Informix does this also. It has a whole management subsystem for its "raw" dataspaces. From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> So do PostgreSQL, DB2 and many others. It's a fairly common feature. --------------- Well, yes; in fact I used to use Informix and still have disks & docs that I've been meaning to archive and/or re-install some day, but if I were asking how to copy a data partition I think I'd call it an Informix disk and not a Unix disk, since that would certainly have a bearing on the how-to. However, now that I re-read the header I can see that he could have meant "copy a disk using Unix" instead of "copy a Unix disk" (which is what I assumed he meant). What would life be without ambiguity... Now, back to Andy, the original poster: did your question get answered? m