On Tue 16 Apr 2013 21:34:37 NZST +1200, Robert Fisher wrote: > I was thinking of putting the failing drive and a new drive into my > PC and running > > dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdd bs=1024k
Good idea. However you *really* want ddrescue for this! It has some critical enhancements - copying can be backwards, and the block size is auto-adapted to the number of read errors you get. Note there are two different ddrescues - one by Suse, and one by GNU. Last time I compared the Suse one was better, but the feature-set wasn't totally identical so you need to look and then choose the one doing your job better. > mfstool add -x /dev/sdd -r 4 > to expand to the new size. I don't know this program. However, in this case actually I would copy files instead of disk blocks, but do make sure you copy the partition table (first disk block, plus the blocks up to the first primary partition) and the fluff around any extended partitons. Copy the tivo system files first and your movie collection last! Is that box running Linux? You should be able to transplant the partition table and the boot loader somehow, and copy all the files on a partition that is already enlarged. The best order of this depends a bit on what's on it. If you buy a newer larger disk, be aware of partition start blocks having to be (!!!) at boundaries of something large enough to not cause overlap issues. 128Mbyte will do, though much less will also be safe. There was the issue of multimedia hard disks being specially constructed for streaming to sustain transfer rates without stuttering, at a premium of course. Is that still an issue? Does the tivo use one of those, and is that the reason for the replacement cost? (More likely, it's just for ripoff reasons though.) Test the new disk boots before copying all the movies... HTH, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
