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By rdskutter (Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 07:28:57 PM EST) (all tags)

The sound of a dying hard drive.

My 6 year old drive finally packed in yesterday. I've coaxed it to read my old /home partition - which is all I really want to rescue. I've got a backup which is 3 months old that contains almost everything I need but for peace of mind I'd really like to copy off what I can before I ditch the drive.

I've found before when doing big copies of multi-gig partitions that it can be quite a challenge to get a good copy.

'cp -r' seems to take up far more space on the target device than was on the original device

'tar -cvzf' always exits after delayed errors

and I'm not quite sure if 'dd' actually creates a useable copy.

So fellow husites, please help me. What is the most reliable way to copy a 202G partition?

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Click Click Click Click | 8 comments (8 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

Damnit! by rdskutter (2.00 / 0) #1 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 07:31:29 PM EST

Where's the 'Edit diary after I've posted it' option?

If there's any editors around, can you please remove the duplicated text.

"BEEN A BIT CARELESS HAVEN'T WE" - Mr Death

I had thought you did that on purpose by lm (4.00 / 1) #2 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 07:50:47 PM EST

A story about a failing hard disk! A story about about a failing hard disk!

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
[ Parent ]

hay guyz by webwench (2.00 / 0) #4 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 08:11:44 PM EST

did I do that rite?

: Yep! by rdskutter (2.00 / 0) #6 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 08:17:51 PM EST

Cheers WW!

"BEEN A BIT CARELESS HAVEN'T WE" - Mr Death
[ Parent ]

Do I read that right? by lm (2.00 / 0) #3 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 07:55:29 PM EST

/home is over 200 gigs?

I think someone needs to rethink their directory structure.

Would compressing at the file or directory level work out?

for each in `find blah blah blah` do gzip infile outfile end

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

: Nah by rdskutter (4.00 / 1) #5 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 08:14:53 PM EST

20G
I fixed the typo in the first copy of the text, but not the second

"BEEN A BIT CARELESS HAVEN'T WE" - Mr Death
[ Parent ]

you said it yourself by theantix (2.00 / 0) #7 Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 10:00:38 PM EST

There is no reason I can think of why cp wouldn't work. File sizes can change slightly based on what filesystems you are using but it shouldn't be anything quite dramatic. But if you swear you don't want to use cp, dd will likely be your best option. It is tricky though, and you have to recreate your partition exactly correct -- using fdisk I'd say, telling it where the start/end of your new partition is -- and making it the exact same type it was before.

I've done it before and it's worked just fine, but it hardly for the weak of heart. You really sure that cp isn't working alright for you?

really?

rsync ? by ambrosen (2.00 / 0) #8 Fri Sep 09, 2005 at 11:19:09 AM EST

Will that do it for you?

Didn't work for me using OS X 10.3 (because it doesn't copy the resource forks), but Tiger and above it should just work, and of course, with Linux and Windows, it just works.

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