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Trying to use clonezilla to clone a failing disk using disk-to-disk with -rescue.
source disk is 320G and target is 1T.
it has been running for about 18 hours, with a WARNING: Can't read sector at N, lost data where N just keeps growing and is now around 394 430 000 000 (spaces added by me for readability).
when should I expect this proccess to end?
epeleg
Posted 2013-10-11T05:10:06.790
Reputation: 457
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A 320 GB disk does not have 394 billion sectors. It doesn't even hold 394 billion bytes (which is about 366.9 GiB, or 394 GB in hard disk manufacturer speak).
A 320 GB disk will have (320 [GB] * 1 073 741 824 [b/GB] / 512 [b/sector]) = approximately 671 million sectors, assuming 512 byte sectors. If it uses 4 KiB sectors, the corresponding number is about 83.9 million sectors, but that's unlikely for a drive of that size; 512 byte sectors would be more reasonable to expect for such a drive.
This means that something isn't working as expected. It's hard to tell from your question exactly what is wrong, but it's a pretty safe bet that something is wrong. I just hope you didn't somehow confuse the source and target drive and it's really complaining because it ran out of space to write the data to...
a CVn
Posted 2013-10-11T05:10:06.790
Reputation: 26 553
yep. just wanted confirmation that I am not stopping it too early. so now I stoped it and I am going to see what do I have on the disks now. and not I don't think I confused the source and target drives. – epeleg – 2013-10-11T13:17:04.497
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That number seems too high for a 320GB disk.
I don't know if Clonezilla -rescue option is the same as ddrescue, but for a failing drive, I highly recommend using GNU ddrescue directly. Here is a very good tutorial for data recovery of a drive with failing sectors.
Aleix Mercader
Posted 2013-10-11T05:10:06.790
Reputation: 704
will this also be useful for a disk on which windows is installed ? – epeleg – 2013-10-11T13:15:55.493
@epeleg: yes, it also works on NTFS filesystems. I assume you just want to recover the data and not transfer the Windows installation to another disk, as that will not work if the disk is failing and lots of sectors are unreadable. – Aleix Mercader – 2013-10-11T13:26:40.217
well, if it has said it can't read for 18 hours I suggest you terminate the process! – barlop – 2013-10-11T09:39:50.910
@barlop I think it's the overall process that has been running for 18 hours, and for some unknown period of time during that, it's been complaining that it can't read. Either way, the sector index is much too high to be normal and expected for such a size drive, as illustrated by the calculations in my answer. – a CVn – 2013-10-11T09:41:06.777
@MichaelKjörling I don't know what you mean by overall process, but I mean in computing terms, the process like how windows lists processes in task manager. he shouldn't wait for the process to end (if it ever does), he should kill the process. – barlop – 2013-10-11T10:07:25.837
First rule when you trying to do something with the HDD which have some known issues:
I'm working with computers for 25 years now, and you wouldn't believe what you can experience with hardware components :) – Nikola Dimitrijevic – 2013-10-11T11:17:00.433
@NikolaD PSU? as in Power Supply Unit? – epeleg – 2013-10-11T13:17:56.937
Yes, Sorry. PSU = Power Supply Unit – Nikola Dimitrijevic – 2013-10-11T16:09:49.113