HDD Failing - Couldnt migrate data. Suggestions?

If the drive is actively failing, please stop using it, you are only damaging it further.

The only program that can reliably clone data out of a damaged disk is ddrescue. It slows down over damaged areas, auto skips ahead, requests sectors backwards (ie not to hit a damaged sector through the disk’s own read-ahead cache), disables caching and goes directly to the drive, and a whole lot of other tricks to get the most data it can out of a drive.

If you use dd for example, that will hang the system forever (=up to the disk drive subsystem timeout on the operating system) if a read error is encountered. This assumes ofc that the drive does not timeout on errors (most non-raid designed drives do not). The result would be that several sectors are shown as errors, since the drive is stuck trying to read a sector over and over again. ddrescue would skip ahead of that sector and start coming back to it backwards to try and read it.

You need to get everything out of the old hdd into the new hdd. The most important parts are the identity files, since that is well the identity of the node. If you lose a file or two due to corruption (ie damaged/unreadable sectors) that’s workable and probably will not be an issue to the storagenode, but losing the identity files kills the node.

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