Mount Problem - Please Help! My Drive is About To Die!

[jack]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 08:09 -0400, Amichai Rotman wrote:
> Hi!
> Please help!
>  
> I have a very strange problem with my Feisty box...
>  
> I have a two year old 80Gb HDD that seems to be dying. I want to run
> the manufacturer's diag tools on it but it asks me to backup all my
> data. So I bought a new drive, same size (both IDE) and installed it.
> I used gParted to set a primary partition of the complete size. I
> formated (mkfs.ext3) and got 74Gb usable space (5% for superuser). I
> created a mount point and mounted it. the relevant command outputs
> follow...
>  
> What do think?
>  
> I tried using rsync -av to copy a 1.2Gb directory over and run df -h
> right after. I should have had 72.5Gb available, but instead it said
> 68Gb...
>  
> df -h:
>  
> /dev/sdc1              74G  180M   70G   1% /Backup
> 
> sudo du -h /Backup/
>  
> 16K     /Backup/lost+found
> 20K     /Backup/
>  
>  
> sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
>  
> Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80032038912 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9730 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdc1               1        9730    78156193+  83  Linux
> 
> I spoke to a friend of mine, and I saw some posts on the list with a
> similar problem. It seems that the 7.04 has a bug(?) when adding a new
> HDD to a live system.
> 
> A friend of mine had a similar problem with the same HDD (make and
> size) and when he inserted it to a Fedora box it worked fine. Note the
> difference in sizes... 
> 
> Any ideas?
>  
> I really need to backup the data ASAP, the source HDD seems to be
> dying...
>  
> Thanks!
>  
[snip]

Depending upon how much data is there, a tarball and a flash drive come
to mind.  Or a tarball and a friend's box (with ftp/scp) would also
work.  I've seen this in the threads here as well (recently, iirc), so
looking through the archive and/or googling/forums , etc should prove
helpful.  But my original suggestion stands if you need to back that
data up - now -  ...

hth