dd took 15 hours to clone 300GB HDD but destination is corrupted

[Scottie303]

I wanted to make a disk clone for backup purposes of a Windows7 HDD for an HP laptop. This was for extra safety before restoring the Laptop to factory defaults. I tried Clonezilla but for some reason it failed to even begin the cloning process ( I did not take note of the errors). I resorted to using dd from the Terminal.

I was booting Ubuntu from an external USB HDD and I was trying to create my backup in a partition on a different HDD also connected via USB. The partition was bigger than the disk I was trying to clone. So fifteen hours later I found that the destination partition was corrupt and my back-up files were nowhere to be found. Well I couldn't face another 15 hours of dd with an unknown outcome so I took a gamble and was able to restore the Windows machine to its factory condition using HP's built in restore program.

So there was no harm done.

When I was waiting for dd to complete I did a few things that may or may not have caused the procedure to fail:
1 - I mounted the target partition part way through dd procedure to see if any files had shown up - they had not.
2 - I kept an eye on the process by running the command: $ sudo kill -USR1 [dd PID] which caused dd to print out a progress report before it would carry on.
3 - The command used to run dd was: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc2 (note - sda is a Windows HDD with three partition, sdc2 is the second partition on an HDD with two partitions)

One other thing may have caused a problem and this was reported by fdisk -l in a terminal: There was a warning that "Partition (sdc1) does not end on cylinder boundary"

Does anyone know if one of the above could have caused the target partition to become corrupted after the dd procedure?
(It is marked as RAW - unformatted whereas before dd it was formatted for NTFS )

[oldfred]

I do not know dd well, except it can be dangerous as any typo causes big issues. Nicknamed Data Destroyer for that reason.
But it is intended for same size to same size copies. Or drive to drive or partition to partition. You can copy drives or partitions to files if enough space, but it also copies all empty space.
Powerful command, but often misused and then nicknamed "dd" Data Destroyer
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

from caljohnsmith post #7
I would recommend using "dcfldd", which is basically dd with more features; it has the really useful feature of showing the copying progress
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1033712

Often bs setting for blocksize can speed it up a lot.

RAW is an unformatted NTFS partition. Data may be NTFS, but the PBR or partition boot sector must also be NTFS with what boot loader (even if data only) and start & size of partition that must match partition table.

Full image backup
GNU ddrescue (packaged as gddrescue, though once installed the command is "ddrescue")
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery


Old info on dd to image drive:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=896519
sudo dd if=/dev/sde | gzip >/media/400/16GB.gz
zcat /media/400/16GB.gz | dd of=/dev/sde

Suggest using Windows backup tools for Windows.

Backup windows before install - post by Mark Phelps
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...0#post12611710
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
Another suggestion by srs5694
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

[VMC]

@ jjm95,

Clonezilla erros can be found on "/var/log/partclone.log". Usually the errors is just a matter of fsck'ing your partition.

 sudo fsck /dev/sdaX

For example:

$ sudo fsck /dev/sda6
[sudo] <enter password> 
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
e2fsck 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013)
/dev/sda6: recovering journal
Setting free inodes count to 1103814 (was 1103822)
Setting free blocks count to 4123339 (was 4123390)
/dev/sda6: clean, 177306/1281120 files, 997266/5120605 blocks

[VMC]

Also i think it would be more efficient to use a block size (bs=) with the dd command.
Another thing you can try, if Clonezilla doesn't work for you, ntfsclone :

ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/sda1 /dev/sdc2

Here's the info on copying Windows to another hard drive:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

By the way, your dd is copying the entire hard drive instead of the Windows partition(s).

More info on using the dd command is found here, and and another good one here.

You can also use dd to backup to an image as well:

dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda of=drive.img

The problem with dd is it copies everything, including empty blocks. That's why I use either CloneZilla, partclone or fsarchiver.