Hi, Please accept my apologies for sending this email to the 'Bug-ddrescue' mailing list as I am asking for help and not reporting any bug. Disk failure is new to me and after days of searching through maunuals and forums I am still not sure my intended use of ddrescue is correct. Any help would be highly appreciated.
The PC my daily work relies upon has the following set up: - unit 0, /dev/sda: a drive with the OS on, opensuse 10.0, with a size of 290GB, and 18GB used. - unit 1, /dev/sdb: a RAID 10 array, for the users accounts, with a size of ~600GB, ~370GB used, and 220GB available. The drive with unit 0 has 26 badblocks. I want to make a backup of that failing disk, eg as in the info file for ddrescue, section 6 'direct disc access', example 1. I do not have any new disk right now. I would therefore like the failing disk, the input, to be backuped as a disk image on the array, the output, without doing anything else (eg repartioning) to this array as I need it as it is. Here is what I would try, from the rescue boot, having mounted the array on /dev/sdb1/: ddrescue -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb1/users/lab/Documents/my_os_bu.img /dev/sda2/users/lab/Documents/my_os_bu.log ddrescue -dr3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb1/users/lab/Documents/my_os_bu.img /dev/sda2/users/lab/Documents/my_os_bu.log Here are my questions: -Q1- Will the above usage of ddrescue corrupt the array and make the situation even worst? -Q2- Will it try to copy the 290GB of unit 0 (/dev/sda) into the 220GB available on the array (/dev/sdb1/), and therefore fill up the array and fail to copy the OS drive entirely? -Q3- To avoid this, should I rather use the -s option to tell ddrescue to stop after 20GB for example as I want the 18GB of data and not the entire, otherwise empty drive?. -Q4- [How] Do I know the 18GB I want will be in these first 20GB, and not scattered all over the drive? I pasted below output from 'mount', 'fdisk -l' and the /proc/partitions file. I am stuck! Please help. Best regards, Stephane %mount: /dev/sda2 on / type reiserfs (rw,acl,user_xattr) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5) /dev/sdb1 on /local type reiserfs (rw,acl,user_xattr,usrquota,grpquota) usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw) /dev/fd0 on /media/floppy type subfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,fs=floppyfss,procuid) /dev/hda on /media/dvdrecorder type subfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,fs=cdfss,procuid,iocharset=utf8) %fdisk -l /dev/sda2: Disk /dev/sda: 319.9 GB, 319988695040 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38903 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 1045 8393931 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 * 1046 38903 304094385 83 Linux %more /proc/partitions: major minor #blocks name 8 0 312488960 sda 8 1 8393931 sda1 8 2 304094385 sda2 8 16 624977920 sdb 8 17 624968631 sdb1 _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue
