Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:16:46 +0000 From: James <jamesh@lanl.gov> To: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> Cc: Sean Murphy <smurphy@calarts.edu>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Help Failing Disk Problem Message-ID: <1194275806.44119.19.camel@secretariat.lanl.gov> In-Reply-To: <20071105135545.V19602@wonkity.com> References: <472F74A9.9090400@calarts.edu> <1194272457.44119.3.camel@secretariat.lanl.gov> <20071105135545.V19602@wonkity.com>
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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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