Some years ago I learned of Clonezilla Live as a drive recovery tool. I was able to recover a hard drive with it by simply copying the failed drive over to a new drive simply because the failed areas were non-critical. It was marvelous. It worked because the cloning process did not allow sector read failures to impede its progress. Recently I had a drive failure occur, so I downloaded the current Clonezilla Live CD:
$ cat /media/cdrom/Clonezilla-Live-Version clonezilla-live-2.1.1-7-i686-pae This Clonezilla live iso file was created by this command: ocs-iso -s -i 2.1.1-7-i686-pae My experience was much different. This revision of Clonezilla Live was unable to replicate the failed drive onto a new drive. It hung up on failed sectors and repeatedly attempted to copy the failed sectors. I let it run for well over an hour and it never would stop mentioning two sequential sectors/drive blocks. There was no evidence that it was able to proceed beyond the first failure it encountered - though it was somewhat difficult to monitor as it kept overwriting the status screen with stderr spew. I eventually was able to figure out that by switching to alternate consoles for a long time, it was possible to switch back to the main console and briefly see the status before it was overwritten. At one point I saw that its estimate at recovery of the 250G drive was at 1186 hours - making it fairly apparent that it was making no progress whatsoever. I tried a number of ways of performing the replication, including sector-by-sector copying. Nothing I tried worked, and various methods would not even try to perform the operation past the point where the first sector failure was. I am not entirely sure that the copy was completely unsuccessful. The point where it got stuck was where two sequential sector numbers were mentioned, and where two sequential block numbers were also mentioned. Conceptually the problem might be related to sequential failed sectors at block boundaries as bugs can often be spawned undetected for only infrequently occurring circumstances. This is pure conjecture. I have not looked at underlying software. After many attempts I finally started considering alternative approaches. I recalled that I still had the Clonezilla Live CD I made the first time I had success with it and failed drive recovery: $ cat /media/cdrom/Clonezilla-Live-Version clonezilla-live-1.2.4-28-686 This Clonezilla live iso file was created by this command: ocs-iso -s -i 1.2.4-28-686 Upon locating this media, I booted it, and in a single attempt, successfully recovered the failed disk. I don't particularly know if the Clonezilla project has made an intentional move away from drive recovery. I looked over the last year or so of mailing list archives and saw no apparent reference to this type of issue. In any event, since the web has numerous testimonials to the capabilities of Clonezilla as a drive recovery tool, perhaps my experience is of note. It would appear that the current revision of Clonezilla Live is no longer suitable for drive recovery. In my case, the drive experienced only sector failures - S.M.A.R.T. showed no other problems except that the sector re-mapping operations had gone over threshold. The drive vendor suggested zeroing the drive to force it to remap all of the failed sectors, however, it appeared that the number of failed sectors exceeded the size of the spare sector pool. In case this type of use is simply not frequently exercised, I decided to write this note to note the possibility of an undiscovered regression, and to put on record a note that might suggest to a future user that an older revision might be helpful in the case of drive recovery. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Clonezilla-live mailing list Clonezilla-live@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/clonezilla-live
