Hi guys, I am total newbie to Linux / Ubuntu but trying it to solve the problem I have.
I have an OKI printer with bad HDD and trying to clone one from the same HDD from working printer. Board it goes on has a Fiery chipset and system used is Linux based / related - to the best of my knowlege. I was using dd and ddrescue to clone the 2.5 inch 20GB HDD but got a message "Unauthorized software" when installed the drive.
I had formatted/partitioned the destination drive in exact same manner as original
and used dd to clone - but did not work, Any pro's - please some advice.
Thank you.
Roman.
The software may be keyed to the serial number it reads from the device. Maybe there is a way to update the license.
Which? Did you format and partition it -- or did you clone it with dd?
You should be able to clone the partitions and everything in one operation. Don't give it sda1, just sda, and so forth. dd if=/dev/original of=/dev/new conv=noerror,sync
Thank you for advice - will take a shot at it as you proposed. Please understand that knowing really nothing I was trying my luck in every possible way. I had even copied boot sector separatelly in addition to Just dd_ing to clean HDD or DD-ing with partitiones predetermined. As my reseach showed - It was suppose to give me a 100% clone so no issues with licence etc. - I guess that would be too easy than huh? In my 34 for a second I had allowed myself to believe that magic exist. Figures if OKI (the manufactured of the printer) wants about $700 for a really $40, 40Gb HDD they would put a wrench in so it can't be just copied. But as a wise man said- for every screw with a tricky tread there is a nut with the same tricky tread 
Thank you for trying to help me - will post upon success or absence of such.
Roman.
---------- Post updated at 10:49 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:46 PM ----------
Oh - software does not really reads the serial number from the device, I mean it might but it is really does not matter if you take HDD's from 5 working printers, mix'em up and put it back - they all will work, no question ask. Some maze....
:wall:Guys it is killing me slowly I am a total newbie in Linux but dd directions are really simple and as far as I understand it copies byte to byte but when I put the hard drive back in to the printer it gives me "Software not authorized" error. After spending so much time and effort it sort of becomes a matter of principal. I really want to crack this nut. I mean nothing is impossible, right? I know I will need your help - please any succgestions - I am willing to try. Thank you.
Another thing I was thinking of - what do you think of the possibility that HDD itself is tweaked? It is normal HDD to the eye, available by model number from numerious sources. What is bootloader? Is part of HDD or part of what we write on it?
Thank you very much in advance.
This is a wild guess, however depending on the filesystem of /dev/original you could use one of
e2label
mlabel
ntfslabel
in order to set the label of the filesystem, this may be part of the identifying key.
What, exactly, did you do? Tell us word for word, letter for letter, keystroke for keystroke.
I don't think they'd have to "tweak" it. Do you have a drive of identical capacity?
Does the clone show the same label as the original? I think some things are stored where dd does not go. Do they look alike on fdisk? They could be formatted to different block size or something.
Also, the printer could be reading the drive firmware for some data.
Yeah, possible, but stupid beyond what is needed to interface the device, which should be portable with a range of devices. Smart manufacturers have at least the potential to switch vendors or upsize in different models. However, we have noticed smart is optional. 
There are no disk blocks that dd doesn't copy. If he copied sda into sdb raw, or whatever the raw disks were, they'll be identical down to the partition tables.
If. We don't know that yet.
As a stream of bytes, yes, but what if sector size is different?
Doesn't matter for SATA/PATA drives except for performance reasons.
We still await the answer of what he actually typed, anyway.