Mark Holtz
02-03-05, 11:23 PM
Unfortunately, I had one of my two Samsung hard drives start to go bad. The first clue is the dreaded click of death. I thought it was a temporary heat-related problem, but it turned out to be something a little more serious. I wanted to make a duplicate of the 160GB drive onto a temporary 250GB drive while the drive was RMA-ed (Samsungs have a three year warranty, and was installed on October, 2003). I initially tried the hard drive cloning utility from Ultimate Boot CD, but it was too slow. Then, I found a procedure on TiVo community that worked pretty well. The Ultimate Boot CD does include diagnostic tools that you will need to generate the report necessary for RMA.
The result? There was a 12kb block that could not be transferred over. A surface scan by the drive diagnostic utility indicated several unreadable sectors. One show has a slight audio delay which is easily fixed by a slight go-back. RMA is in process now.
If you have any comments, please let me know. I will be incorporating this in the FAQ.
IMPORTANT! You perform the following procedure at your own risk. DBSTalk is not responsible for any data lost from this procedure.
This procedure was performed with Knoppix 3.04 (May 17, 2004) CD. It is a 700 MB download for the CD. I performed this on my Athlon 2200+. I hooked up the hard drives on the primary channel and the CD drives on the secondary channel. It is important to note which drive is which. Here is the procedure:
1. Hook up the drives.
2. Boot up the Knoppix CD.
3. When the boot prompt comes up, type the following:
knoppix 2 vga=ext dma nousb nodhcp
2 Boots up in text-only mode
vga=ext Goes into a 50-line text mode, otherwise it will use the graphics card to generate the text output. In my case, the graphics output is much slower.
dma This engages the faster transfer rate between drives
nousb nodhcp Optional parameters, but skips the detection for usb and network devices
4. Enter cd /usr/bin
5. Start the transfer process by typing in the following:
dd_rescue -B 1b -b 2M -A -v -l /var/dd_rescue.log sourcedrive destinationdrive
-B 1b When it hits a bad sector, it will switch to 512-byte blocks for transfer
-b 2M Under normal transfer, it will take 2MB blocks
-A If dd_rescue is unable to read the bad sector, then it will write a blank sector on the destination drive.
-v Verbose output. Gives you a progress report on the transfer.
-l /var/dd_rescue.log Optional. This generates a copy of the progress report to a text file in the /var/ directory.
sourcedrive destinationdrive These are the two hard drives that you have hooked up. You will want to put in the following:
/dev/hda Primary Master Drive
/dev/hdb Primary Slave Drive
/dev/hdc Secondary Master Drive
/dev/hdd Secondary Slave Drive
6. The transfer will take place in window 1. To switch to other windows, hold down the Alt key and press the Fx key. (I believe that under Knoppix, its 6 different screens.)
7. Once the transfer is complete, you can take a look at the logfile at /var/dd_rescue.log . If you want to copy it to floppy, do so now. Under Knoppix, the /var/ directory is in the ram drive, and will disappear when you shut down.
8. Type halt to shut down the Knoppix system. The system will shut down, and eject the CD.
During the copying process, the copying speed will be around 35,000kb/s. When it hits a bad sector, it will slow down and try to copy the bad sector over. On my computer, this involved resetting the IDE bus, so that when it went back to normal copying, it was hitting 1,000-2,000 kb/s. When this happens, hit Control-C to abort out of the copying process. Note down the place where you stopped. Then, shut down Knoppix completely, turn off the PC, then restart the system. When you get back to the prompt, enter as part of the dd_rescue line -s xxxxxxxxk. This will restart the copying process at that point.
Also, normally, dd_rescue will copy the drive from beginning to end. By entering -r, it will copy the drive from the end to the beginning. When I did a scan of the drive, it indicated a problem at the 25% point. If I had utilized this parameter, it would have copied my drive in less time.
©2005 by DBSTalk. All rights reserved.
Some material from TiVo Community (http://www.tivocommunity.com/)
The result? There was a 12kb block that could not be transferred over. A surface scan by the drive diagnostic utility indicated several unreadable sectors. One show has a slight audio delay which is easily fixed by a slight go-back. RMA is in process now.
If you have any comments, please let me know. I will be incorporating this in the FAQ.
IMPORTANT! You perform the following procedure at your own risk. DBSTalk is not responsible for any data lost from this procedure.
This procedure was performed with Knoppix 3.04 (May 17, 2004) CD. It is a 700 MB download for the CD. I performed this on my Athlon 2200+. I hooked up the hard drives on the primary channel and the CD drives on the secondary channel. It is important to note which drive is which. Here is the procedure:
1. Hook up the drives.
2. Boot up the Knoppix CD.
3. When the boot prompt comes up, type the following:
knoppix 2 vga=ext dma nousb nodhcp
2 Boots up in text-only mode
vga=ext Goes into a 50-line text mode, otherwise it will use the graphics card to generate the text output. In my case, the graphics output is much slower.
dma This engages the faster transfer rate between drives
nousb nodhcp Optional parameters, but skips the detection for usb and network devices
4. Enter cd /usr/bin
5. Start the transfer process by typing in the following:
dd_rescue -B 1b -b 2M -A -v -l /var/dd_rescue.log sourcedrive destinationdrive
-B 1b When it hits a bad sector, it will switch to 512-byte blocks for transfer
-b 2M Under normal transfer, it will take 2MB blocks
-A If dd_rescue is unable to read the bad sector, then it will write a blank sector on the destination drive.
-v Verbose output. Gives you a progress report on the transfer.
-l /var/dd_rescue.log Optional. This generates a copy of the progress report to a text file in the /var/ directory.
sourcedrive destinationdrive These are the two hard drives that you have hooked up. You will want to put in the following:
/dev/hda Primary Master Drive
/dev/hdb Primary Slave Drive
/dev/hdc Secondary Master Drive
/dev/hdd Secondary Slave Drive
6. The transfer will take place in window 1. To switch to other windows, hold down the Alt key and press the Fx key. (I believe that under Knoppix, its 6 different screens.)
7. Once the transfer is complete, you can take a look at the logfile at /var/dd_rescue.log . If you want to copy it to floppy, do so now. Under Knoppix, the /var/ directory is in the ram drive, and will disappear when you shut down.
8. Type halt to shut down the Knoppix system. The system will shut down, and eject the CD.
During the copying process, the copying speed will be around 35,000kb/s. When it hits a bad sector, it will slow down and try to copy the bad sector over. On my computer, this involved resetting the IDE bus, so that when it went back to normal copying, it was hitting 1,000-2,000 kb/s. When this happens, hit Control-C to abort out of the copying process. Note down the place where you stopped. Then, shut down Knoppix completely, turn off the PC, then restart the system. When you get back to the prompt, enter as part of the dd_rescue line -s xxxxxxxxk. This will restart the copying process at that point.
Also, normally, dd_rescue will copy the drive from beginning to end. By entering -r, it will copy the drive from the end to the beginning. When I did a scan of the drive, it indicated a problem at the 25% point. If I had utilized this parameter, it would have copied my drive in less time.
©2005 by DBSTalk. All rights reserved.
Some material from TiVo Community (http://www.tivocommunity.com/)