Copy process over hardware failure is endless

[Keith Roberts]

On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, wwp wrote:

> To: mc at gnome.org
> From: wwp <subscript at free.fr>
> Subject: Copy process over hardware failure is endless
> 
> Hello there,
>
>
> I'm trying to copy the contents of a disk to another. The source disk
> shows ext3 fs problems due to hardware failures, and the copy process
> within mc is endless. Copying from or to a broken disk layer is
> something I always avoided from within mc because of this behaviour.
>
> In /var/log/messages I'm getting tons of:
> Sep  7 14:48:03 monolith kernel: sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Add. Sense: No additional sense information
> Sep  7 14:48:32 monolith kernel: sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Sense Key : No Sense [current]
> Sep  7 14:48:32 monolith kernel: Info fld=0x0
>
> I'm not asking for mc to fix hardware problems, but is there a way to
> tell it to give up when it's stuck in such endless error-retry loop? Or
> maybe it's not mc but the low-level functions that are responsible?
>
> Pressing S for skip or A for Abort will never skip/abort, and I would
> like mc to copy as many files as it can, if possible it could ignore
> errors after few retries and give a list of skipped files at the end of
> the process?
>
> Any thought?
>
>
> GNU/Linux Fedora 11, kernel 2.6.29.6-217.2.16.fc11.i686.PAE.
>
> F11's GNU Midnight Commander 4.6.2:
> Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, cpiofs, ftpfs, fish, smbfs, undelfs
> With builtin Editor
> Using system-installed S-Lang library with terminfo database
> With subshell support as default
> With support for background operations
> With mouse support on xterm
> With internationalization support
> With multiple codepages support
> Data types: char 8 int 32 long 32 void * 32 off_t 64 ecs_char 8
>
>
> Regards,
>
> -- 
> wwp
>

Sounds like you need to run a disk repair program first. 
That should do the necessary repairs if possible, and copy 
any files it can save to another location.

Fedora should come with testdisk.

[quote]
TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the 
terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was 
primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or 
make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms 
are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or 
human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition 
Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really 
easy.

TestDisk can

     * Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
     * Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
     * Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
     * Fix FAT tables
     * Rebuild NTFS boot sector
     * Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
     * Fix MFT using MFT mirror
     * Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
     * Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
     * Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For 
those who know little or nothing about data recovery 
techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed 
information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent 
to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with 
such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in 
performing onsite recovery.
[/quote]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Do:

[root]# yum list *testdisk*

HTH

Keith Roberts

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