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 -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------