0

Trying to use clonezilla to clone a failing disk using disk-to-disk with -rescue.

source disk is 320G and target is 1T.

it has been running for about 18 hours, with a WARNING: Can't read sector at N, lost data where N just keeps growing and is now around 394 430 000 000 (spaces added by me for readability).

when should I expect this proccess to end?

Improve this question
6
  • well, if it has said it can't read for 18 hours I suggest you terminate the process!
    – barlop
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 9:39
  • @barlop I think it's the overall process that has been running for 18 hours, and for some unknown period of time during that, it's been complaining that it can't read. Either way, the sector index is much too high to be normal and expected for such a size drive, as illustrated by the calculations in my answer.
    – user
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 9:41
  • @MichaelKjörling I don't know what you mean by overall process, but I mean in computing terms, the process like how windows lists processes in task manager. he shouldn't wait for the process to end (if it ever does), he should kill the process.
    – barlop
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 10:07
  • First rule when you trying to do something with the HDD which have some known issues: 1. Use the new PSU, or at least the one you didn't run in the same configuration with that HDD 2. Use brand new UATA/SATA cable (whichever is yours) 3. If something is still wrong, try to do all that but on different MoBo I'm working with computers for 25 years now, and you wouldn't believe what you can experience with hardware components :)
    – Nikola Dimitrijevic
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 11:17
  • @NikolaD PSU? as in Power Supply Unit?
    – epeleg
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 13:17

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

A 320 GB disk does not have 394 billion sectors. It doesn't even hold 394 billion bytes (which is about 366.9 GiB, or 394 GB in hard disk manufacturer speak).

A 320 GB disk will have (320 [GB] * 1 073 741 824 [b/GB] / 512 [b/sector]) = approximately 671 million sectors, assuming 512 byte sectors. If it uses 4 KiB sectors, the corresponding number is about 83.9 million sectors, but that's unlikely for a drive of that size; 512 byte sectors would be more reasonable to expect for such a drive.

This means that something isn't working as expected. It's hard to tell from your question exactly what is wrong, but it's a pretty safe bet that something is wrong. I just hope you didn't somehow confuse the source and target drive and it's really complaining because it ran out of space to write the data to...

Improve this answer
1
  • yep. just wanted confirmation that I am not stopping it too early. so now I stoped it and I am going to see what do I have on the disks now. and not I don't think I confused the source and target drives.
    – epeleg
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 13:17
1

That number seems too high for a 320GB disk.

I don't know if Clonezilla -rescue option is the same as ddrescue, but for a failing drive, I highly recommend using GNU ddrescue directly. Here is a very good tutorial for data recovery of a drive with failing sectors.

Improve this answer
2
  • will this also be useful for a disk on which windows is installed ?
    – epeleg
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 13:15
  • @epeleg: yes, it also works on NTFS filesystems. I assume you just want to recover the data and not transfer the Windows installation to another disk, as that will not work if the disk is failing and lots of sectors are unreadable.
    – Aleix Mercader
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 13:26

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .