dd time

[Michael Kratz]

On 05/12/2006, at 10:28 AM, Ben Williams wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Long time ex-subscriber, first-time-in-a-while poster ;)
>
> I've got a hard drive that has started to die - bad sectors - and  
> before it goes totally down, I'm using dd to copy it to a new  
> drive. I've got running on the box:
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
>
> It's a 160Gb source drive. Does anyone have any clues as to how  
> long it may take? I would guess it's just a question of read/write  
> speeds on the drives, but has anyone done something similar and can  
> say "ooh, I reckon about 8 hours, at a guess" or "ooh, I reckon  
> about 8 days, at a guess"?
>


It takes a while.

When I do this I normally stick an ampersand on the end to push it  
into the background. Then just watch to see when the process finishes.

It depends a lot on the performance of your system. 60GB IDE to 60GB  
IDE used to take me about 90 minutes.
20GB IDE to SATA RAID on different controllers, a few minutes... it  
was so quick I was a little concerned that it didnt' actually work,  
but it did.

It would be nice if dd gave some form of verbose feedback about what  
it was doing and where it was up to.


--
Michael