[lug] Cloning / Replacing Hard disks

[Ryan J Nicholson]

Gordon,

If a disk is truly dying, I would not trust it enough to use it as an image
master. Replace the disk, and reinstall the OS. You don't want to
troubleshoot problems related to file system corruption - damaged libraries,
segfaults, odd and difficult to trace errors.

If you have any important data on the disk, GNU ddrescue is what you're
looking for. Dead simple. It's dd without the i/o lockups. Be aware that
there are two (2) ddrescue programs...in Debian, installing the "ddrescue"
package provides dd_rescue, and installing the "gddrescue" package provides
ddrescue. Yes, it's a bit confusing. Install gddrescue. You will need enough
free disk space on your recovery station to make a file as large as the
partitions you are recovering. And then just let it run as long as you can,
or until it finishes (if the disk is badly damaged it will never finish).

Something else to keep in mind is Red Hat's GNOME Disk Utility (aka
Palimpsest). It's included in Ubuntu. Boot off the install CD and go into
live demo mode, then System > Administration > Disk Utility. It's intuitive
and shows all the S.M.A.R.T. statistics. I use this to check disks for
presence of bad sector counts. Debian has smartmontools which should be able
to show all of the same info, but Disk Utility is a nice interface. Use the
Maverick or newer live CDs because Lucid's version didn't include vertical
scroll bars - impossible to use on low-res screens.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gnome-disk-utility

As Dave mentions, though, SMART doesn't tell all. If a drive is clicking,
and SMART checks out...don't trust it, replace the disk.

Ryan
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