cp /dev/hda3 /dev/hdb3

[Jan Kokoska]

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 16:38 +0200, Super Donkey wrote:

> I tried mounting the partition right after I sent this email and it didn't
> work. Some error message about superblocks being out of size. qtparted
> prints the message that the (former ntfs) partition is strange.
> 
> I will and see if Windows will recognize it (I haven't Windows installed
> at the moment). Though the HD is in such a bad shape that after 10-20
> minutes in Windows it makes the click of death. In linux it doesn't but if
> I have smart on in the BIOS it will not boot into linux as the kernel
> gives me some IO error messages.
> 
> I will also try less and cfdisk/fdisk. BTW: Partition magic tells me that
> the paritition is unformated.

throw disk > /dev/bin

Or actually, what I would do would be "smartctl -a /dev/hdX", see the
error log at the bottom, number of reallocated sectors and how long has
it been running (if this gets anywhere close to 50K hours, it begs for
replacement, half disks are expected to die by that time). Move data
out, sequentially rewrite the disk with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX
bs=1M conv=sync" then read it into /dev/null again and in another
console monitor it with "vmstat 1". If it starts spitting out errors or
just sounds wrong and no blocks out in vmstat, don't bother further.
Disks are cheap these days.

Regards,
Jan