Backing up a nearly dead HDD

[Paul F. Johnson]

Hi,

It looks like my problem with readahead isn't readahead!

The drive which has my home directories seems to have a problem. If I log in
as root (please don't bitslap me yet!), and from the command line look at the
home directories, I can see paul, becki, richard and lost+found which is fine
as they're supposed to be there.

If I then try to look at the contents of /home/paul, it takes ages and the
hard drive makes funny noises, so I'm thinking it's at the end of it's life
more or less.

fsck shows some bits and pieces, but essentially, it's not picking up any
problems.

Is there a way I can copy everything from one drive to another and keep the
permissions from a dodgy drive to a working one? cp -ar seems an option, but
it takes a while!

TTFN

Paul

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[Andrew Haley]

Paul F. Johnson writes:
>  Hi,
>  
>  It looks like my problem with readahead isn't readahead!
>  
>  The drive which has my home directories seems to have a problem. If I log in
>  as root (please don't bitslap me yet!), and from the command line look at the
>  home directories, I can see paul, becki, richard and lost+found which is fine
>  as they're supposed to be there.
>  
>  If I then try to look at the contents of /home/paul, it takes ages and the
>  hard drive makes funny noises, so I'm thinking it's at the end of it's life
>  more or less.
>  
>  fsck shows some bits and pieces, but essentially, it's not picking up any
>  problems.
>  
>  Is there a way I can copy everything from one drive to another and keep the
>  permissions from a dodgy drive to a working one? cp -ar seems an option, but
>  it takes a while! 
The traditional fast way is "dump -f - | restore -f -" [*] but I'm not
sure dump handles extended attributes correctly.

Andrew.

[*] The drive should NOT be mounted R/W.

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[Randy Wyatt]

Have you used smartmon tools ?  These actually give me the best results for
determining the number of errors encountered by a drive.

>   >
>   > Is there a way I can copy everything from one drive to another and keep
>  the
>   > permissions from a dodgy drive to a working one? cp -ar seems an
>  option, but
>   > it takes a while!
>
>  The traditional fast way is "dump -f - | restore -f -" [*] but I'm not
>  sure dump handles extended attributes correctly.
>
>  Andrew. 


Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive, dd is
perfect.

>  [*] The drive should NOT be mounted R/W.
>
>  --
>  Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor,
>  Berkshire, SL4 1TE, UK
>  Registered in England and Wales No. 3798903
>
>  --
>  fedora-devel-list mailing list
>  fedora-devel-list(a)redhat.com
>  https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>

[Pádraig Brady]

Randy Wyatt wrote:
>  Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive,
> dd
>  is perfect. 
dd is not great when used with a failing drive.
Try ddrescue instead.

Pádraig.

[Jima]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>  Randy Wyatt wrote:
> > Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive, dd
> > is perfect.
>
>  dd is not great when used with a failing drive.
>  Try ddrescue instead. 
  s/dd/dd_/ -- contrary to logic, ddrescue and dd_rescue are, in fact, 
different projects, and it appears we only have dd_rescue in Fedora. 
(Interestingly enough, they both seem to be currently maintained, and 
ddrescue was actually last updated 11 days ago.  Huh.)

      Jima

[Pádraig Brady]

Jima wrote:
>  On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> > Randy Wyatt wrote:
> >> Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive, dd
> >> is perfect.
> >
> > dd is not great when used with a failing drive.
> > Try ddrescue instead.
>  
>   s/dd/dd_/ -- contrary to logic, ddrescue and dd_rescue are, in fact,
>  different projects, and it appears we only have dd_rescue in Fedora.
>  (Interestingly enough, they both seem to be currently maintained, and
>  ddrescue was actually last updated 11 days ago.  Huh.) 
FFS.

Antonio can you enlighten us on why you chose this confusing name?
Could you merge with the original project to alleviate confusion in the future?
What does ddrescue do differently to dd_rescue?
Couldn't we merge this functionality into dd anyway?

Pádraig.

[Jonathan Dieter]

On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 07:34 -0800, Randy Wyatt wrote:

>           >
>           > Is there a way I can copy everything from one drive to
>          another and keep the
>           > permissions from a dodgy drive to a working one? cp -ar
>          seems an option, but
>           > it takes a while! 
>          
>          
>          The traditional fast way is "dump -f - | restore -f -" [*] but
>          I'm not
>          sure dump handles extended attributes correctly.
>          
>          Andrew.
>  
>  
>  Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive, dd
>  is perfect.  
I'd suggest dd_rescue.  When it hits a bad sector, it lowers its block
size and retries, thus (hopefully) retrieving more data.

Jonathan

[Jima]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Randy Wyatt wrote:
>  Have you used smartmon tools ?  These actually give me the best
> results for
>  determining the number of errors encountered by a drive. 
  Closing the barn door after the cows have gotten run over by a semi, but 
yes, a good idea. :-)

>  Why not use dd?  if you are replacing a drive with a similar drive,
> dd is
>  perfect. 
  dd tends to not work well on iffy media.  I'd advocate using dd_rescue 
rather than dd; it handles errors better.

  I usually use the freezer trick on dying drives.  Basically, you put the 
drive in a plastic zippered storage bag (i.e., Ziploc), and put it in the 
freezer.  Wait until it's pretty well cold, then pull it, plug it in, and 
try and get the data off ASAP.  (I don't understand the finer 
thermodynamics of it, but I believe it has something to do with the cold 
contracting metal parts, or compensating for heat-related issues. 
Something.)  I usually use rsync (if it's ext3) or dd_rescue (if it's 
NTFS/FAT, or I otherwise need a bit-by-bit copy) to get the bits off.
  Use at your own risk, your mileage may vary.  It's worked for me (quite a 
few times), maybe it'll work for you.

  Good luck!

      Jima

[Pekka Pietikäinen]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 02:11:42PM +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:
>   > Is there a way I can copy everything from one drive to another
> and keep the
>   > permissions from a dodgy drive to a working one? cp -ar seems an option, but
>   > it takes a while!
>  
>  The traditional fast way is "dump -f - | restore -f -" [*] but I'm not
>  sure dump handles extended attributes correctly.
>   
I had a broken drive once too, and I used LVM2 to migrate to a new drive.
First I added a new drive with enough space to the volume group, removed the
broken one from it and it (slowly) managed to move every block it could 
to the new drive.

Then I ran fsck -y on it, and after a long time most of the data was still
there.

Not too long afterwards I got 3 500GB drives and had my very own 1 TB 
RAID5 at home.

Anything that works at the filesystem level (tar, cp) seems to be pretty
painful with broken harddrives since they take very long to finally raise
their hands up and move on.

I think there's a "don't try too hard" version of dd that's intended
for
broken media, you could also do a byte-to-byte copy with that (vs. LVM2) and
fsck afterwards.

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen