date:20170210

Re: HELP! Re: How to fix I/O errors? (SOLVED)

2017-02-10 Thread Marc Shapiro

On 02/08/2017 05:32 PM, David Christensen wrote:

On 02/08/17 15:59, Marc Shapiro wrote:

So how do I lay down a low level format on [the new 1 TB] drive?

I would use the SeaTools bootable CD to fill the drive with zeroes:

On 02/03/17 23:13, David Christensen wrote:
> Sometimes you get lucky and the tool is a live CD:
>
>
www.seagate.com/files/www-content/support-content/downloads/seatools/_shared/downloads/SeaToolsDOS223ALL.ISO

David

I didn't feel like burning a CD and it has been a long time since I had
a box with a 3.5" floppy (although i do have one or two drives in a box
somewhere and quite a few of the folppies, themselves, as well) so I
just used dd to write zeros to the disk. It took a while, but it did
the job. In the end, I picked yet another method for moving to the new
disk. As mentioned in my first post, I am using LVM and I have unused
space in the VG. I was debating with myself whether I wanted to continue
to use LVM, or just use raw disk partitions. I almost went with raw
disk partitions before I came across 'pvmove', which does exactly what I
needed. So...

I partitioned the new disk with 3 physical partitions of 2GB each for
root/boot partitions.

The 4th partition was set up for LVM and was set as a Physical Volume
(PV) to be added to the volume group along with my old drive.

Before adding the new disk, I created a new Logical Volume (LV) and
manually copied my home partition (one user tree at a time) to the new
partition. This spat out errors whenever it hit an unreadable sector
and I redirected those errors to a file for later use.

I then added the LVM partition from the new disk to the Volume Group
(VG) and did a 'pvmove' for each LV from the old PVto the new PV.

I included the original LV for /home, along with the newly copied LV. I
expected it to spit out errors and fail, but it didn't. I could hear it
struggle a bit when it hit the bad spots, but then it kept going. This
was actually a good thing. I had the list of affected files from when I
did the manual copy of the /home partition, so I knew what to check
after the move. Several of the files were videos. Using the original
files before copying, Xine would play up to the first I/O Error and then
freeze, even though it continued to read the file and advance the
timeline until the file ended. Using the manually copied file, which
truncated at the first error, I also only got the beginning of the video
and then it ended. Using the file from the original LV which I moved to
the new disk with pvmove, however, gave better results. There is a bit
of flicker when it hits a sector that had been unreadable before moving,
but it continues on so the rest of the video can be viewed. A few of
the other files I did delete (Libre Office document files do not survive
well, but I have a PDF of that file if I ever need it again).

Then I just had to copy over the root/boot partitions which I did from a
shell after booting my clonezilla CD (it came in handy after all) and
run lilo on them to make the new disk bootable. Everything seems good,
now. I ran the full test from SeagateTools (st) again, today, just to
verify that all was still good. It was. I now have an empty PV in my
LVM volume group that I will need to remove before I add any new Logical
Volumes (LVs), but I can do that any time. Since there are no LVs on it
nothing will attempt to read from it, or write to it.

I'll keep an eye on the disk for a while, but this should fix the
problem. If I ever have a failing disk again I hope that I will
remember this method because the LVM pvmove command really did make
moving to another disk easy. The hard part was dealing with the
root/boot partitions and getting the new disk bootable.

Hopefully this thread will help someone else who has a similar problem
in the future.

Marc

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