Re: Help Failing Disk Problem

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 14:04 -0700, Warren Block wrote:

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.

rsync -cav takes cares of symlinks and all that just right. It's a
beautiful thing.

Checksumming, too. Ah, bliss.


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


dump has the problem that a lot of tools have, though, including rsync.
It creates a file list to start from.

If the file names on the drive change during the dump, corruption can
occur. At least on linux. I remember Torvalds ranting about it on a
mailing list. I imagine FreeBSD suffers the same issue, though, as it's
a pretty generic problem.

dump is a good tool, though, no arguments really here.

James

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