[CentOS] Question about dd (fill a hard disks' unused space with blanks)

Sun Jun 7 19:59:05 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Kevin Krieser wrote:

>>  I'll second the recommendation for clonezilla.  It knows enough about
>> most filesystems (including windows ntfs) to only store the used  
>> blocks
>> and it can use network storage over nfs, smb, or sshfs if you use the
>> bootable CD clonezilla-live version.   If you do a lot of cloning, you
>> can also use the network-booting drbl version on a server that will  
>> PXE
>> boot a client into clonezilla with the image storage directory already
>> NFS-mounted.  There is an rpm for Centos to install this.
> 
> 
> The problem I had with clonezilla I had when I tried it once was I was  
> attempting to clone a hard drive (windows) that had some bad sectors.   
> Clonezilla didn't handle that well at all.

That doesn't sound like a clonezilla-specific problem. Have you found 
some other tool that magically reads bad sector?

> Either in duplicating the  
> drive from one drive to another, or when I tried to back it up to a  
> file on another USB drive failed verify.  Luckily, I had done a recent  
> windows backup, so I went through the recovery DVD route on the new  
> drive, removed programs I had previously removed from the factory  
> install, then restored over itself.  I spent a lot of effort trying to  
> avoid that.

But - how often are you planning to clone bad drives?  I'd try to use 
something like ddrescue to try to recover first.  In the normal case, 
clonezilla does a good job.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com