Failing Disk

[George Magklaras]

Jim, I disagree with you. I would be interested to know how dd would 
handle read errors on the failing drive. :-) Have you completed many 
rescue operations with drives whose reliability is questionable without 
hickups only with dd???

If his failing drive is in a bad state and is likely to give persistent 
I/O errors, doing a dd the way you describe it in your number list will 
either abort the read operation or copy things inconsistently. Again I 
would substitute dd with dd_rescue. If his blocks are OK, dd_rescue will 
behave exactly as dd. If the blocks on the origin drive are broken, it 
will persist until it copies as much data as possible.

GM




Jim Canfield wrote:
>    [1]m.roth2006 at rcn.com wrote:
> 
>  Troy,
> 
>   
> 
>  Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:23:26 -0700
>  From: Troy Knabe [2]<knabe at 4j.lane.edu> 
> 
>  Thanks.  Just to clarify, I can't run the dd while the system is up and running normally?
>     
> 
>  Um, don't try to dd /dev, btw....
> 
>      mark "me? tar? dd? no, never (what never? hardly ever....)"
> 
>   
> 
>    Mark,
> 
>    Did I give bad advice?  I have used dd quite a bit and never had any
>    problems.  Granted I am always copying to identical drives.  Now that I
>    think about it, it would be important to have identical disk geomerty
>    (cylinders, heads, sectors).  Sorry Troy, guess I'm exposing my ignorance.
>    :)
> 
>    -Jim
> 
>     
> 
> References
> 
>    Visible links
>    1. mailto:m.roth2006 at rcn.com
>    2. mailto:knabe at 4j.lane.edu