I have to respectfully disagree with you on several of your points. I'm
writing from my own experiences having just replaced a bad drive and having
used Linux for many years now, both on a server and desktop system.
On 9/28/2012 1:59 AM, Henry Yen wrote:
2. A command everyone should know is: dmesg
That command prints out all of your boot-up messages. The identity
of drives will either be in lines beginning with "hda:" "hdb:" (etc.)
for IDE drives, and lines containing "Vendor:" and/or "Model:" for
scsi/sata drives.
Yes, dmesg is a good idea, but with any newer kernel, it doesn't use the hda
and hdb syntax at all. I've found that hdparm is more reliable and gives
more information.
5. Make sure you get a replacement drive that is at least as large as your
old drive. You should be able to clone your old drive completely to your
new drive using ddrescue or dd-rescue; these cousin commands are based on
"dd", but continue on in the face of errors, and use strategies like
copying from the end towards the beginning, and in chunks, to absolutely
maximize the amount of data copied. After doing that, your new drive
will be exactly the same as your old drive (including the logical damage,
which will at least no be afflicted with physical error problems), and
you should be able to even boot both systems just as before.
You can also fsck the new drive, as it won't get confused by
hardware failures any more.
While this is generally correct, you're making two wrong assumptions.
First, that doesn't work on all filesystems. Specifically, XFS doesn't use
fsck. The way to fix an XFS volume is with xfs_repair. The second problem
is with Windows. I promise you that on Windows 2000 and up, and in
particular with XP, dd and similar won't work. For the Linux partition,
ddrescue is great and I would highly recommend it. I prefer it over dd
because it does rescue more files and gives a progress report while still
being fairly fast. On newer versions of Windows, it won't boot if you do a
straight dd copy. You have to change a registry entry first. I found this
out when I had an unbootable Windows system after doing a full copy.
6. Actually copying the drive could be tricky for you, depending on
what hardware you have available. A USB drive converter is the least
common denominator, but it's deathly slow. A separate "work space"
system on your local network would be better.
If you use Image for Linux or Windows, you can copy to a USB drive or via
the network. Depending on how much damage there is, rsync will copy your
Linux files, but not the boot sectors. You can also backup to DVDs, but
that could get complicated. Image offers good compression. Unless your
drive is very full, it probably wouldn't take more than 10 to 15 DVDs at the
most and almost definitely fewer.
7. For future reference, there are various partition cloning/backup
systems for Linux that support Linux and Windows partitions, and are
very fast (mostly because only blocks that are actually being used are
copies, and blocks in the free list are not).
OK, what are they? They aren't partimage or Clonezilla because I looked at
both of those. Clonezilla is very slow and requires booting from a live CD.
Partimage is similar. I didn't find any open source backup programs that
have as many features as Image for Windows or Image for Linux, are
completely accessible with screen readers, offer good compression, make
bootable restore DVDs, can copy to either internal drives, USB drives, DVDs
or over the network and offer a boot CD with Speakup already included. If
you know of any free backup software with that feature set and without a lot
of bugs, I'm very interested. Oh, and the Image suite gets updated fairly
often and frequently gains new features. Yes, I realize that it's
commercial, but I really haven't found a free alternative with the same
features and the same level of accessibility.
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