I would like to thank the following people for their quick response.
Michael Ramchand <mpr@fj-icl.com>
gmp@adc.com (Gregory M Polanski)
Mark Belanger <mjb@ltx.com>
ahill@lanser.net (Alan Hill)
Brad Young <bbyoung@amoco.com>
negativl@netcom.com (Raymond Wong)
swelch@home.net (Shaun Welch)
I had a disk that was not backed up go bad, Sparc 10 SunOS 4.1.3_U1.
I had tried dump and dd to tape and another disk, neither worked.
The solution I found that worked in this case was to add another disk to the system and use tar. When it got to the bad blocks it complained but continued ( after a slight delay) to copy over the good data. The command I used was
cd /olddisk
tar cvf - . | ( cd /newdisk ; tar xvfp - )
I've included the responses below because they include good ideas of what
to check when a disk goes bad.
Thanks,
Ken
You could try cpio'ing it to another disk.
for each directory that you want to copy, create a directory of the same
name on the new disk and then:
cd to the directory on the old disk and type
find . -depth -print | cpio -pmvd /newdisk/newdir
This will work for all the normal files, and retain ownership and
permissions. Won't work on raw partitions.
You can also try using tar to backup the directory. remember to use relative
pathnames, or you'll have a beast of a time restoring, however. It's also
a matter of identifying what sorts of hardware probs the disk is having. Are
you getting block errors? these can often be repaired (at least temporarily)
using the format utility. Sense and other errors in the disk controller can
sometimes be caused by thermal problems, so powering down and letting the drive
cool for an hour can sometimes get you enough time to back it up, but be sure
to copy the files you can, before you try that, because sometimes powering down
means you can't get the drive back.
If you have lots of money, and the data is important, you can probably get the data recovered.
I've used Ontrack 1-800-752-1333. They aren't cheap; they are competent.
I've found that most bad disks are usually bad power supplies.
Pull the cover off an measure the voltages just for the heck of
it. Most disk drives run on 12V and 5V. Anthing below 11.6 V is
probably bad. If you a similar drive, you can compare the readings
on the two.
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