[sllug-members]: rsync errors

[Shawn Willden]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Jared Bernard <jared.bernard at gmail.com> wrote:
> What exactly does this mean? Does it mean I have bad sectors or something
> more serious? Is this drive definitely on it's way out?

It means it has bad sectors, and on modern drives that's very serious.
 For the last several years all drives have done automatic remapping
of bad sectors.  The drive's firmware notices a problem and relocates
the data to a spare sector.  By the time you get bad sectors actually
showing up at the OS level, it means that the drive has already used
up its spares.

It's time to replace that drive.  And it's likely that not everything
on it will be recoverable.  To find out how bad it is, you might try
tar'ing up all the files on all the partitions.  You can just write
the output to /dev/null, and then pay attention to how many files have
I/O errors.  Something like:

"tar cv /mountpoint >> /dev/null"

Run that for the mount point of each partition on the drive.  If it
all succeeds without errors then at least you should be able to
recover all your data from the drive.  Probably.

-- 
Shawn