Help Failing Disk Problem
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Mon Nov 5 13:05:08 PST 2007
On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, James wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 11:53 -0800, Sean Murphy wrote:
>
>> I have a FreeBSD 6.2 Release box with a single ide that has user data
>> and the FreeBSD OS on a hard disk that is failing. I need advice on the
>> best way to clone the entire disk (or at least the data) onto a larger
>> ide disk drive, then pull the failing disk and replace it with the
>> clone. What is the best way in FreeBSD to do that?
>
> The best way is to do it regularly before the hard drive is failing.
>
> Given that you haven't done that, there're a few methods. I'm a big fan
> of rsync, which is the nectar of the gods, but a lot of folks seem to
> prefer dd for this kind of thing.
rsync is too high-level, and may not do exactly the right thing with
links or sparse files or who knows what. dd is too low-level--you get
the same partition table/bsdlabel and the exact same slice/partition
sizes. That's okay on an identical hard drive, but a pain on one that's
larger.
dump, on the other hand, is just right.
-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
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