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I have a linux installation in a 50GB partition, on an old 80GB sata disk that is starting to show some errors in it's SMART status, and also, it's an old slow disk. So I want to copy it to a newer sata disk with a spare 500GB partition on it.

I tried to do it using gparted using copy/paste. Gparted starts to copy it but fails with a read error after about 9 GB. Checking the filesystem on the source partition shows no errors, but I see 3 sectors in the SMART "Current Pending Sector Count" (using Ubuntu's Disk Utility) and I am thinking they are the problem? Is there a way to force it to remap these sectors to eliminate the errors?

Is there a way to tell gparted it continue, rather than stop, when it finds a read error? Should I try a different tool?

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Why you don't use ddrescue? It was designed for that purpose in question.

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  • Because I'd never heard of it :) It also didn't occur to me that I'd need a rescue tool as this disk is bootable and working. It boots and runs my current linux desktop system day to day. It just has a few errors that don't show up in normal use. I thought I could just copy it.
    – Jazz
    Nov 11, 2012 at 10:30
  • Will ddrescue copy a small partition to a larger partition, and I suppose I will have to check and resize the filesystem manually after the copy? (this is why gparted is so nice - if there had been no error - because it handles everything and you don't have to muck around so much)
    – Jazz
    Nov 11, 2012 at 10:39
  • The nice thng about ddrescue is that it skips errors (or try to fix them), and yes, you will have to resize the partition later. Nov 12, 2012 at 7:48
  • I need to be sure before I attempt this. The target PARTITION is already larger so I won't be resizing it, but if I use ddrescue to copy - partition to partition - it obviously won't fill it. What is the next step? Check the filesystem with fsck, then resize the FILESYSTEM (not the partition)?
    – Jazz
    Nov 12, 2012 at 12:35
  • I have successfully achieved this operation. The steps were to use ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda5 /dev/sdb1 , followed by -v -f /dev/sdb1 ,followed by resize2fs /dev/sdb1. Mounting the disk at /mnt and grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot gives me a bootable linux system on the new disk (without the single 12k error that was stopping gparted).
    – Jazz
    Nov 13, 2012 at 5:01

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