Re: HOWTO: Move FreeBSD to a new hard disk

faq
search
add article
cool-stuff
how-to
main
tips
parent
thread

Re: HOWTO: Move FreeBSD to a new hard disk
by Jason on Saturday August 30, @09:44AM

Hi Jennifer,

First, I don't think a weekly drive copy is asking to much of your hard disks. How much data are we talking about? If it's only a couple of gigabytes then you should expect your drives to hold up just fine.

I've personallly seen your "fsbn error(s)" on two drives of my own. On one the drive was bad, no question about it. On the other, it turned out to be the removable drive bays I was using. The drive stopped having problem as soon as I moved it out of the bay.

I have a good contact with a computer store and they see drives that will fail in a system but will pass the manufacturers required tests. The problem is that computer stores often cannot return a drive under warranty if it passes the manufactueres silly little tests. Case and point; I had a problem with a Dell hard disk that could easily pass Dell's 9090 test but would fail constatntly when in the system. After bantering endlessly with Dell tech support I finally just bought a new drive, copied the data over and the problems went away. Dell never replaced their malfunctioning drive even though it was under warranty!

Re: Question 1-4

1. I would do whatever you can to save your data.

2. Many times unless you have very large, very full drives. I've been doing a monthly backup on two pairs of drives since about 1999 without a problem. I recommend single user mode for drivecopy backups on a system whos data is changing regularly (i.e. an SQL server).

3. drivecopy.sh is a reliable way of moving an installation and doing periodic backups (ie not daily).

4. If you need to do regaular daily backups I would use a SCSI DAT drive (I prefer Seagate). I have a Samba server at a site where I use drivecopy.sh whenever a major change is made to the system, but use the DAT drive to backup their data on a daily basis.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Jason

Related Links

Articles on Miscellaneous

Also by Jason

Contact author

Sponsors

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
( Add a Reply )

Re: HOWTO: Move FreeBSD to a new hard disk
by Jennifer Zhao on Sunday August 31, @03:40PM

Hi, Jason

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply, which gave me confidence what to do next.

I agree with you that manufactueres' silly little tests on their HDD doesn't gurantee their HDD at all!

In fact, Yesterday, I used the following commands and seems it recovered the corrupted partition, though not the data, which I think it has lost anyway.
--I bootup the troubled HDD, and enter into single user mode
--issue command
#mount ad0 /mnt
#newfs /dev/ad0s2e
#shutdown -h now
--Restart the computer, this time the booting was alright, and I used fsck -p, it seems all the partitions are clean now.
Maybe this is the work around way to fix the troubled HDD.
Just hope it will NOT happen corrupted data during backup in the future.

Thanks to recommand Seagate backup tape.
However, since I do not know much about Seagate backup tape, do you mind I ask you a couple of questions about it?
1. Which one you recommand: Internal or External one?
2. which Technology I should choose for FreeBSD backup, DDS-4, DDS-3 or DAT72 ?
3. Which interface I should choose: SCSI-2 or ULTRA 2 SCSI LVD

Your advice are highly appreciated

Jennifer

[ Add a Reply to this ]

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
( Article Reply )

"You never know how many friends you have until you own a Condo on the beach." -- Jason's Postulate

[ main | post article | search ]