[CentOS] A questiong about replacing my failing drive

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005, Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:

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> On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 09:11:47PM -0400, Mark Weaver wrote:
> > >I have not checked G4U yet, so I really mean this as a question:
> > >
> > >How is it easier ? dump | restore is as straightfoward as it gets.
> > >I have been using it for 15+ years, and never had a problem (except
> > >for raiserfs filesystems, of course).
> > >
> > >Yes, if I were going to produce a lot of copies of the same disk, then
> > >I would look for something like Ghost (or G4U, will check it later
> > >tonight). But for this particular task ?
> > 
> > all right then...I'll bite. All I've ever personally known is Norton 
> > Ghost which is why I'm so quick to mention its use. I'm, however, 
> > extremely curious and eagar to learn new techniques such as the one 
> > you're talking about. Why not lay the process out so's we can get a look 
> > at how to work it? I've got a few drives around, especially one that I'd 
> > like to clone that has some bad sectors on it that I really need a file 
> > from - its a program I wrote a while back that I simply don't want to 
> > have to re-write.
> 
> Check my other post regarding this. Dump won't clone wholedisks. It
> will clone filesystems (with all metadata intact).

The problem with a broken disk is that your filesystem may not be correct. 
And you can't do a fsck to correct the inconsistencies because the disk is 
not reliable.

That's why you require something like ddrescue, so you can copy everything 
that is still accessible and fill the blank spaces in with zero-blocks. 
So it doesn't abort or truncate the output like dd, maybe dd conv=noerror 
is similar but ddrescue has other features like proper status info during 
copying and decreasing blocksize when blocks fail to be read.

I have no experience with ghost, does it work if disks have read errors ? 
How does it handle them ?

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]