replacing failing main drive

[kikkegek]

ok, I changed my plan to ubuntu-rescue-remix

booted with a live version from USB.

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#ddrescue -v -r 3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb logfile

been running now for 14 hours at an average recovery rate of 14MB/sec...its done little over 600GB now....and it doesnt stop at bad blocks...so, hopefully in anbother 6-8 hours I'll be done and able to replace the main drive and boot t e HDA up again. I'll report back here when finished.

[kikkegek]

Done!

found 7 errors, 21 hours of recovery...1069kb in errors...now splitting failed blocks

waiting for it to finish so I can see if the HDA will boot back up

[ghstryder]

By all means let us know how it worked out. All the "well, in theory" is good, but real-world experience beats that hands down.

[kikkegek]

By all means let us know how it worked out. All the "well, in theory" is good, but real-world experience beats that hands down.

this morning it was running for 36h straight and was at the second try to read the bad sectors.

I'll report back here when it finishes...trust me...I will..

[kikkegek]

finally, its done. after 47hours.

33 errors, only lost under 700kb as reported

replaced the old drive with the cloned new drive, connected the 750GB drive again and voila. HDA booted right up like nothing happened.

Need to check if everything is working now. but for now I am a happy puppy!

[kikkegek]

wow!

everything seems fine:

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Mar 28 20:15:42 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 28 20:15:52 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 28 20:16:02 2 read_smb_spool: Can't get tasks count: MySQL server has gone away Mar 30 19:13:20 6 daemon: Greyhole (version 0.9.20) daemon started. Mar 30 19:13:20 6 daemon: Optimizing MySQL tables... Mar 30 19:13:21 7 daemon: Loading metadata store backup directories... Mar 30 19:13:21 7 daemon: Found 2 directories in the settings table. Mar 30 19:13:24 7 simplify_tasks: Simplifying pending tasks. Mar 30 19:13:24 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:13:35 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:13:47 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:13:57 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:08 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:18 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:28 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:38 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:48 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:14:58 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:08 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:18 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:28 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:38 7 read_smb_spool: Processing Samba spool... Mar 30 19:15:39 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:49 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:15:59 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:09 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:19 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:29 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:39 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:50 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping.

and

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[root@amahi jochen]# greyhole -s Greyhole Statistics =================== Storage Pool Total - Used = Free + Trash = Possible /var/hda/files/gh: 886G - 594G = 247G + 0G = 247G /var/hda/files/drives/drive1/gh: 688G - 450G = 203G + 0G = 203G ========================================== Total: 1573G - 1044G = 450G + 0G = 450G

and

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[root@amahi jochen]# greyhole -S Currently idle. Recent log entries: Mar 30 19:16:39 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:16:50 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:00 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:10 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:20 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:30 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:40 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:17:50 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:18:00 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Mar 30 19:18:11 7 sleep: Nothing to do... Sleeping. Last logged action: sleep on 2012-03-30 19:18:11 (2s ago)

anything else you guys advise to check?

[vladgur]

wow!

everything seems fine:

Out of curiousity, how much time total did you spend replacing your failing drive.
Including research, trying different approaches, etc.

[kikkegek]

wow!

everything seems fine:

Out of curiousity, how much time total did you spend replacing your failing drive.
Including research, trying different approaches, etc.

well...I had to find out and install the software to detect the errors and setup the gmail system on my HDa to be able to sent warnings to my external emailaddress, because my hda is headless. that took me a couple of hours.

the recovery itself.

47h of running ddrescue on the hda

then replaced the drive

compared the Pictures share on the drive to my external backup.

replaced the bad drive

in total I think 8-12 hours extra on the 47h...

[ghstryder]

Nice work, too! Congratulations!

dd and ddrescue are great tools.

[bigfoot65]

Now that you have dedicated a lot of time, I would recommend you do a backup with Clonezilla or some bare metal backup software. At least then if you have problems, it will take 15-20 minutes to do a restore on a new drive.

I do periodic Clonezilla backups (OS only) for my HDA and have restored a few times in the past with no issues. That includes when my drive was going bad and had to be replaced. Clonezilla had me back up and running within 30 minutes of installing the new drive.