Dichotomy...

Note to self: using dd to copy a dying disk is a good plan. Using dd to copy a dying 36GB disk 1 byte at a time is a bad plan. It took about an hour yesterday to dd the disk at the default rate of 512 bytes per read/write. But because the source disk is damaged, it's got some bad sectors, so the new disk was missing some boot sector information, leading to a kernel panic on startup. I decided to dupe it again with a lower read/write block size to hopefully avoid this problem. Unfortunately, I didn't do the math first to realize that copying 37580800000 bytes, one by one, was just going to take a damn long time, even with 15000 RPM Ultra2 Wide SCSI disks. Oh well.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 10:15 AM | Permalink