Thanks for the help, Hugo.  

Sorry that it has taken me so long to get back to you.  My router definitively 
died just after I sent my email, and I only had a slightly Heath Robinsonian 
replacement up and running OK about 45 minutes ago.

On Saturday 29 August 2009 11:57:30 Hugo Mills wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 11:10:14PM +0100, Lisi wrote:
> > I am getting the following error when I try to copy my husband's home to
> > backup.
> >
> > [r...@dozy peter]# mount /dev/hda2 /backup && \cp -Rpu /home/. /backup
> > cp: reading
> > `/home/./peter/.thunderbird/8qfkppsa.default/Mail/mailhost.zen.co.uk/Inbo
> >x': Input/output error

>    So close... :) You go all that way, and then don't do the very last
> step: try copying the Inbox file to /tmp, say. Do you get the same I/O
> error? If so, how far does this get before you hit the same error?
>
> $ dd if=Inbox of=/tmp/Inbox bs=512

[r...@dozy mailhost.zen.co.uk]# dd if=Inbox of=/tmp/Inbox bs=512
dd: reading `Inbox': Input/output error
505912+0 records in
505912+0 records out
259026944 bytes (259 MB) copied, 33.2324 seconds, 7.8 MB/s
[r...@dozy mailhost.zen.co.uk]#

>    An I/O error would usually say to me that there's some problem with
> the media. 

Probably - I was trying to get backup bang up to date before blitzing the 
media with tests after a strange hanging boot up. :-(

> I would also expect the problem to be logged in the main 
> syslog (/var/log/syslog on Debian-like machines, /var/log/messages on
> Red-Hat-like machines) -- look for error blocks like the one near the
> top of [1].

There were none the same, but a lot like so:

Aug 29 17:38:42 Dozy kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Aug 29 17:38:42 Dozy kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 76183415
Aug 29 17:38:42 Dozy kernel: hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady 
SeekComplete Error }
Aug 29 17:38:42 Dozy kernel: hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, 
LBAsect=76183416, sector=76183415
Aug 29 17:38:42 Dozy kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown

I read those together as probably the HDD which has the OS and /home, and aim 
to start there in my tests.  (Since it seems to be reading that is the 
problem, and reading a specific location at that.)  But am open to 
correction.

TIA
Lisi

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