Re: Hard drive testing?

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 17:56 -0600, Wolfgang wrote:
> 
> I tried to copy the Windows partition over to my 500 GB (which has
> enough space) and now it GParted is unable to due to bad sectors, any
> ideas on that one?  Also, I feel a shift to Windows 7/Fedora dual boot
> and losing Ubuntu as Ubuntu is losing it's appeal now that they are
> trying too hard to make it mainstream.
> 
> -- 
> "You must control your future by taking command of your present, and
> fixing and learning from your past."
> 
> "When history is forgotten people don't realize when it repeats."
> 
> "Я - тот. Я - всемогущее. Я буду управлять по всем."

Wolfgang,

In cases like this, a "rescue" version of dd is probably the best tool
for the job. It tolerates and can step over bad sectors on the source
(writing empty sectors to the destination).

There are two common variants:

        $ rpm -qa | grep rescue
        dd_rescue-1.23-1.fc14.x86_64
        ddrescue-1.13-1.fc14.x86_64

There's a man page for ddrescue but not dd_rescue. For quickie help
screens type 'ddrescue --help' or just  'dd_rescue' with no arguments.
Each has strengths, weaknesses, and features not found in the other. I
prefer dd_rescue:

        # dd_rescue \
        -l /pathto/local/logfile \
        -o /pathto/local/badblockslogfile \
        -A -v \
        /pathto/source/partition \
        /pathto/destination/partition_or_imagefile

You can use dd_rescue to copy a partition from one device to another, or
to an image file as an intermediary. Note: It will exhaustively retry
reading every block with a read error. If all read tries fail, it writes
zeros to the destination block, makes an entry to the badblockslogfile,
and moves on. Those exhaustive retries can take a long time. I've had
dd_rescue take two days to image a 40GB NTFS partition.

--Doc



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