On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:52:12 +0000, Alan Secker wrote:
> Once again I have dd failing to copy one drive to a clone. The answer last
> time was one or more corruptions on the target drive.

Think about it, drives would not have the same bad blocks in the same
location on target drive, if any.

dd is going to copy badblock tags to clone which would not have those
bad blocks. Downside is you could be dd'ing data into bad blocks on
target drive and that is not good.

> To wipe the drive painlessly, I booted from a DOS floppy and ran
> PZAPPER.EXE which wipes the boot record of a selected drive.
> Is there a way of doing much the same thing under Linux (but equally without
> a potential whoops factor)?

There is no protection as you have stated the request.

You want to wipe mbr and partition table on hdb then
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
wipe just mbr
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=446

Personally, I would want to create/format partitions to rule out
possible bad block issues on target drive and use
cp -a or rsync -av to copy each partition.

Put commands is a script and whoops factor goes way down after you
have debugged the script.

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:52:12 +0000, Alan Secker wrote:

> Once again I have dd failing to copy one drive to a clone. The answer
> last time was one or more corruptions on the target drive. To wipe the
> drive painlessly, I booted from a DOS floppy and ran PZAPPER.EXE which
> wipes the boot record of a selected drive.
>
> Is there a way of doing much the same thing under Linux (but equally
> without a potential whoops factor)?

As BT explained, there are much better ways to do this. Is your object a
backup, or a clone? When I replaced the 40gb drive on my laptop, I saved
partition table to an external USB drive then used a Live CD with
partimage to copy the partitions. I then swapped drives, reloaded the
Live CD and restore everything from the USB drive. Simple, relatively
quick, and rather painless.

Bit Twister wrote:


>
> There is no protection as you have stated the request.
>
> You want to wipe mbr and partition table on hdb then
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
> wipe just mbr
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=446
>
> Personally, I would want to create/format partitions to rule out
> possible bad block issues on target drive and use
> cp -a or rsync -av to copy each partition.
>
> Put commands is a script and whoops factor goes way down after you
> have debugged the script.



As it happens, a while ago I downloaded a drive fitness tester, from
memory I believe from Hitachi. It self boots from a CD. I think I'll give
that a go before using the above and starting again.

I like to clone my hard drives now and again when they are stable and
when I'm about to 'try' something. Belt and braces for me.

Thanks for the above. Much appreciated.

Alan

Alan Secker wrote:

> Bit Twister wrote:
>
>
>>
>> There is no protection as you have stated the request.
>>
>> You want to wipe mbr and partition table on hdb then
>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
>> wipe just mbr
>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=446
>>
>> Personally, I would want to create/format partitions to rule out
>> possible bad block issues on target drive and use
>> cp -a or rsync -av to copy each partition.
>>
>> Put commands is a script and whoops factor goes way down after you
>> have debugged the script.
>
>
>
> As it happens, a while ago I downloaded a drive fitness tester, from
> memory I believe from Hitachi. It self boots from a CD. I think I'll give
> that a go before using the above and starting again.
>
> I like to clone my hard drives now and again when they are stable and
> when I'm about to 'try' something. Belt and braces for me.
>
> Thanks for the above. Much appreciated.
>
> Alan

It was from Hitach but I found it doesn't 'like Serial AT drives!!!!

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:21:04 +0000, Alan Secker wrote:

> Alan Secker wrote:
>
>> Bit Twister wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> There is no protection as you have stated the request.
>>>
>>> You want to wipe mbr and partition table on hdb then
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1
>>> wipe just mbr
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=446
>>>
>>> Personally, I would want to create/format partitions to rule out
>>> possible bad block issues on target drive and use
>>> cp -a or rsync -av to copy each partition.
>>>
>>> Put commands is a script and whoops factor goes way down after you
>>> have debugged the script.
>>
>>
>>
>> As it happens, a while ago I downloaded a drive fitness tester, from
>> memory I believe from Hitachi. It self boots from a CD. I think I'll give
>> that a go before using the above and starting again.
>>
>> I like to clone my hard drives now and again when they are stable and
>> when I'm about to 'try' something. Belt and braces for me.
>>
>> Thanks for the above. Much appreciated.
>>
>> Alan
>
> It was from Hitach but I found it doesn't 'like Serial AT drives!!!!

I had the same problem a couple of days ago. The Hitachi tool hangs at the
ATA CD/DVD-RW units too. Ran the drive scan from Seagate on it, using the
Ultimate Boot CD, which came up with the 4 errors in the first 1% of the
drive, which had been plaguing my booting process, and a totally clean
disk after that. It would not attempt a repair, as the drive was Hitachi,
and not of their manufacture.

Being as overwriting with dd hadn't worked to clear the bad blocks, I ran
DBAN over it, only for the first 2% then rescanned with the Seagate tools,
which then pronounced it clean, throughout.

Repartitioned it, as it had been, with fdisk, used mkfs to format it to
ext3, and rsync -av to move the / system files, /home, /data, /
files from their temporary storage locations on another drive. I put the
files in the temporary storage previously by also using rsync -av.

I then reinstalled grub to the MBR. It worked perfectly, runs like a fresh
installation, and all the boot problems from IO errors were eliminated.

DBAN is here;

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Ultimate Boot CD is here, and has DBAN, and the Seagate tool I used, on it.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

The only things that didn't work as advertised, on the entire disk, are
the two Hitachi tools.

BT"s right about dd being great for either wiping the MBR, or backing it
up, but it's really the wrong tool for transferring a whole system. Using
rsync -av for each partition is a much better choice, and much quicker too.

--
old-polack
Of what use be there for joy, if not for the sharing thereof?