FW: Tek XD88 (disk copying / sectors etc)

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Wed Feb 14 21:21:35 2001

At 05:41 PM 2/14/01 +0100, Iggy wrote:
>Julian Richardson skrev:
>
>>Hi,
>
>>This was from a private email between Joe and myself - but as he says,
>>there's plenty of disk / Unix experts on the list that might be able to
>>answer this one!
>
>>We were talking about the possibility of doing a raw backup of the failing
>>disk in my Tek system and restoring it onto another disk to get it to
>>work...
>
>If you don't trust a raw copy, why not just throw in your other (newer) disk
>on the SCSI bus, disklabel it, format it, partition it, and do a "copy -R" of
>the entire filesystem?
>
>Besides, it's not as though you'd actually destroy your old disk if you
made a
>copy. Just try the dd route, and if it doesn't work, truy something else. You
>really haven't got anything to lose.
>

    That should work EXCEPT that he can no longer boot the machine bue to
the failed disk drive. He needs to mount the drive in another machine and
duplicate it there. However, it's very unlikely that he'll be able to find
a machine that can read the old drive and correctly interpret the data.
Therefore, he needs to find a way to just read it as raw data and make an
EXACT copy of it on the new drive. The copy will have to be exact since it
will include the i-node tables and all the other things that make up a Unix
file system. That's why I suggested one of the disk duplicating programs
like Ghost.

     Joe
Received on Wed Feb 14 2001 - 21:21:35 GMT