On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Chuck Noyes wrote:
Hi All,
I have a drive that sounds like it's about to fail (making strange noises and occasionally not booting), so I want to copy it to another identical drive. The drive has 1 NTFS partition on it - I very occasionally run Win2k.
I booted up the 5.0 KNOPPIX CD and tried dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb. There were no error messages and after about 30 minutes the 'dd' finished. However from KNOPPIX, I can't mount the new drive. the mount command (sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1) fails with:
"Couldn't mount device '/dev/hdb1'. input/output error - mount failed".
The original drive (/dev/hda1) mounts without any problem.
If I use the fdisk utility and look at the partition table, there are no differences between the hda and hdb drives.
Any ideas how I can solve this problem??
Hi Chuck, I don't know what the default block size is for dd, but maybe you could try adding "bs=512" to the dd arguments, so that you're copying on sector boundaries. I can't explain why this would help (if it does), its just a hunch. :) Also, maybe you could you turn off DMA to one or both drives before doing the dd. "hdparm -d0 ..." or something like that. -Jamie