Clone Abort

[rbflapjack]

I am afraid I have a severely damaged disk.  I have a 2-disk raid that is failing.  During the disk check both drives showed about 10% health so I am attempting to clone.  The drives are setup through a PCI RAID card (if it matters).  The first pass of the clone took about 10 hours.  The second pass has been going for about 24 hours now.  My first question is:  in the status window, it says at the top "2nd Pass, 190464 to clone".  Does this mean it has 190464 sectors to re-clone because they were skipped during the first pass?  If so, it sounds like it is hopeless.  Right now it has already found 654 read errors so at this pace it will take months.  I read in your manual that you can abort the clone during pass 2 and restart from the same place.  However, when I hit the ESC key, nothing happens.  I have waited several hours and still  nothing.  How can I get the clone to stop?  I assume that doing a hard power off is not a good idea.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thank You.

P.S.  Is it possible that the RAID card itself has gone bad? 

[Joep]

Hello,

The fact that DiskPatch does not respond the ESC key, is because control currently lies with the BIOS. Eventually DiskPatch will respond. And also, eventually it will continue to the next sector. The skipped blocks that it is currently processing are known to be bad. This can take a long time, we have seen reports of 2nd pass taking a week.

Rebuilding the array is a passed stage, with or without a complete 2nd pass. Assuming the array is RAID 0 you will need something like iRecover to extract data from the array. I'd now allow DiskPatch to respond to the ESC key (so it can continue pass 2 at a later stage if needed). Then attach the clone and the healthy array member to 'normal', non-RAID ports. Use iRecover to reconstruct an array and recover data.

190464 skipped sectors may sound like a lot, but against millions of sectors copied the bulk of your data may very well be recoverable.

[rbflapjack]

Thanks for the reply.  One thing to clarify is that I am doing the clone with both raid drives connected through the PCI card so diskpatch sees the raid as only one drive.  Maybe this is the wrong way.  My plan was to let diskpatch complete the clone of both drives simultaneously and then try to recover the data from the clone target (one drive).  Is this the wrong way to go?  Should I clone each raid drive independently and then try to recover?  Thanks.

[Joep]

Hello,

Aha, I see, didn't get that first. Yes, I get the idea, getting the 2 disks of the array onto one single disk. But while this is normally possible, I do not recommend this setup when one of the 2 disks is in bad shape. Better is to identify the bad disk and clone that.

And yes  ... you have the clone lacking a few sectors. Correct? Did you try attaching that clone to another PC and see if you can access it?