Well, I lost a drive in my raid. The new drive did not take so I was advised to clone the drive. I tried several Windows based utils. All of them failed at the task of pure sector cloning. Pathetic.
Well, Linux (Ubuntu) to the rescue. I downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 LiveCD because I knew I could use ddrescue to copy sectors and the software would skip the bad sectors. Groovy.
Well, it took a bit of fiddling to get it to work so here is what I did.
Step 1 : Grab Ubuntu : http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
Step 2 : Once you have booted in and are “trying” out Ubuntu you will need to dd_rescue package.
If you downloaded the 32 bit Ubuntu go here :
http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/i386/ddrescue/download
If you downloaded the 64 bit Ubuntu go here :
http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/amd64/ddrescue/download
Pick a mirror and you can download/save the .deb file.
Step 3 : Extract the deb file
You should cd ~/Downloads
in here you want to extract the file like so :
ar x ddrescue_1.23-1_i386.deb
This will create several files :
-rw-r--r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 1096 2012-01-10 07:22 control.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 22251 2012-01-10 07:22 data.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 23540 2012-01-10 07:21 ddrescue_1.23-1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 4 2012-01-10 07:22 debian-binary
You want to extract the data.tar.gz :
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
This will give you several more files but the one you want is : ./bin/dd_rescue
Step 4 : Figure out which disk you need to clone!
Get a list of disks on the system like so :
sudo lshw -C disk
This will give you manufacturer info so it will be easy to figure out which one is the new drive, etc. Ok, whew.
It looks like so :
Step 5 : clone that sucker!
sudo ./bin/dd_rescue -v /dev/sdc /dev/sdd
This means clone the /dev/sdc device to /dec/sdd with verbose mode turned on. Yes you can watch it clone. It’s exciting. Actually this sucks. It’s hours and when it encounters errors it slows down like a stoned turtle.
That should do it however. Hopefully the data is intact on the new drive!