Re: Clone or copy failing hard Disk

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:45:04 -0700, Don Raboud wrote:

Gordon Darling wrote:

I have a dual core 64 bit Athlon based box running Suse 10.3 with a
failing hard disk. It'll run for 4 to 8 hours then freeze. Reboot and
the disk is missing from the BIOS. Wait 30 minutes for it to cool down
and the disk reappears and then I have to fsck the disk. The box is
still under rtb warranty but the supplier is sending me a replacement
disk on a swap basis.

I've managed to back up the important stuff to DVD (/home /etc and so
on) but the ideal solution would be to try and clone the disk or copy
everything with permissions, symlinks, etc (xxcopy?) if I can before it
fails totally.

Suggestions on best route to take when the replacement drive arrives.
Failing drive is SATA 250GB Hitachi partioned as /dev/sda1 on /
/dev/sda2 on swap
/dev/sda6 on /home
/dev/sda5 on /usr
/dev/sda7 on /var


New disk is the same size as the failing one I presume?

If the failing drive is /dev/sda and the new dirve is /dev/sbd, try

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=8M conv=noerror

This will make an exact copy of the disk (including all partition
information) subject to reading errors. The conv=noerror tells dd to
continue if read errors are encountered.

You could also set up the partitions on the new disk before hand and use
dd once for each partition separately, like

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=8M conv=noerror dd if=/dev/sda2
of=/dev/sdb2 bs=8M conv=noerror ...


Good luck.

I believe you'll also need conv=sync - noerror keeps it going past
errors; sync replaces bad blocks with nulls - otherwise data gets
scrambled, at least that was my experience in backing up partitions to a
file.

.

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