# DD Copy a 300 GB Drive (How Long Should I Wait?)



## svandive (Feb 8, 2002)

Hello everybody, 

I have an HR10-250 that I upgraded awhile back to have an A drive of 250Gig and a B Drive of 300 Gig. I have been having problems watching HD shows while anything else is recording, and as such found that the model of Hard Drive I used for the B drive has a known issue as a Tivo Drive. This drive seems to have an issue due to the cache and or its read ahead features or something (I guess I shouldn't guess here but I know it has an issue). 

So on with the story...

I pulled the drives out and pulled down Hinsdale's trusty how-to and set to work moving all of the data on the 300 Gig B drive to a new Seagate 400 Gig drive. I loaded the drives into a PC, and booted off of the universal boot disk. I then checked to make sure the drives were seen correctly in dmesg and that they reported the right sizes. Everything checked out. I then proceeded to follow Hinsdale and issue the following command:

dd if =/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k

Well the problem here is that I issued that command over 48 hours ago, and the machine is still cranking away. The red LED for hard drive activity is on and flashes ever so slightly (like it should), and I know the machine is responsive as I logged into another console session (ALT+F2) and the machine responds fine. So the question should I just wait it out and see how long this could take? I have to admit I didn't check to see if DMA mode was operational before issuing the dd command. I know I can use hdparm to check and see if DMA is enabled, but I am worried about trying that now that the copy has started, and I REALLY REALLY don't want to stop this thing only to find out that I have to start it again. 

Please, any conjecture or help that can be provided to comfort me or at least delude me in to believing that my drive is being copied ever so slowly would be great. Also if anybody has any great suggestions for getting what I am trying to do done (copy the B drive to a new drive without losing everything I have on it currently), I would also appreciate this feedback as well.

As always thanks to everybody on the list for the great help I have always received.

Ciao,
Scott


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## xnevergiveinx (Apr 5, 2004)

thats a really long time...however, it did take me about 8 hours to do a DD on a 160 gig drive to a 200 gig drive. but that was using oldschool 40 wire ide cables....so it was suspected.

honestly, i don't like the DD command because there is no feedback. i like the mfsbackup|mfsrestore command because it gives you a percentage on what it's doing...also it will expand the the drive automatically if you issue the correct switch (i think it's -xzpi)

i'm not sure of the advantage of the DD compared to the mfsbackup|mfsrestore, i wish someone would rewrite and update the hinsdale's guide. i would, but i don't know it well enough


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## marcush (Jan 21, 2003)

I had this problem recently and it took me a week to realize what was going on. The problem as I saw it was that the system was running out of memory and the dd process would freeze. I was booting from a cd and trying to dd from a failing 250GB drive to another 250GB drive. Once this thought occurred to me I put the drive into a linux box and ran dd from the OS. The copy completed in under 6 hours.


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## svandive (Feb 8, 2002)

xnevergiveinx said:


> thats a really long time...however, it did take me about 8 hours to do a DD on a 160 gig drive to a 200 gig drive. but that was using oldschool 40 wire ide cables....so it was suspected.
> 
> honestly, i don't like the DD command because there is no feedback. i like the mfsbackup|mfsrestore command because it gives you a percentage on what it's doing...also it will expand the the drive automatically if you issue the correct switch (i think it's -xzpi)
> 
> i'm not sure of the advantage of the DD compared to the mfsbackup|mfsrestore, i wish someone would rewrite and update the hinsdale's guide. i would, but i don't know it well enough


<Reply>
If I am not mistaken to use mfsbackup / restore, I would have to have another drive with the capacity to hold all of the info I needed backup, and then to restore that to the new drive. I would love to do this as it is a procces that gives feedback. If my understanding here is flwed please correct me so I can get my Tivo back.....

Scott


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## svandive (Feb 8, 2002)

marcush said:


> I had this problem recently and it took me a week to realize what was going on. The problem as I saw it was that the system was running out of memory and the dd process would freeze. I was booting from a cd and trying to dd from a failing 250GB drive to another 250GB drive. Once this thought occurred to me I put the drive into a linux box and ran dd from the OS. The copy completed in under 6 hours.


Looks like that might be what is happening here. I took a look and out of the almost gig of ram this machine has (the PC I am using to do the copy) it only has 8 meg free, and 980 are being used. This without the avalablity of any swap space would certainly tie things up a bit.

Scott


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## BillyBob_jcv (Feb 21, 2006)

svandive said:


> <Reply>
> If I am not mistaken to use mfsbackup / restore, I would have to have another drive with the capacity to hold all of the info I needed backup, and then to restore that to the new drive. I would love to do this as it is a procces that gives feedback. If my understanding here is flwed please correct me so I can get my Tivo back.....
> 
> Scott


I'm not sure I fully understand what you said - but you can pipe the mfsbackup to the mfsrestore so that you can go directly from hda->hdb (or any other 2 device names). That's what I did using the weaknees instructions.


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