Greetings all! I've run this scenario past a couple folks on twitter and we're scratching our heads.
I've got a 60gb Hitachi drive that is going south on me. No problem, I'll dd the drive and restore to a good drive. Well, I start the dd and it gets to the same sectors every time and just grinds to a halt. I've run the dd command as followsdd if=/dev/sdc of=/mnt/bigdrive/hitachi_60.dd conv=noerror,sync bs=512
I have also tried dcfldd. It runs up to the same spot and then proceeds to tell me dcfldd /dev/sdc Input/output error
2939840+2463 records in
2942303+0 records out
The records in and out are incrementing so I'm thinking progress is being made, but I'm just not sure. Plus, I thought dd and dcfldd were supposed to just make a bit-by-bit copy and when bad sectors came along, it would pad those sectors with NUL's? Not spend hours trying to read the bad sectors.
I've let this job run for 36-48 hours and it just can't seem to make it past this spot. Is dd/dcfldd working as intended and should I just let it run for a week?
Try using a dd program that compensates for errors such as ddrescue.
Running ddrescue now. Still choking on same spot. Guess I just have that many bad sectors and ddrescue is at least attempting to read each and every bad sector which takes time I guess.
Thanks Patrick for the input!
Have you attempted reverse sector cloning?
Cheers!
farmerdude
I have not tried Reverse Cloning and don't know much about it. Perhaps I need to study up.
However, the good news is that ddrescue has moved past the bad sectors and is now halfway through the image. Looks like I may have some degree of success after all.
Media Tools Professional is a software tool that can perform reverse-cloning and cycle-cloning.
Basically reads from the end of the media to the beginning.
Use the "noerror" option.
dd if=/dev/hdc of=largedisk.dd conv=noerror,sync
noerror,sync was used. See first post. )
One approach I use is Incremental imaging
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