dd is crashing after a few hours of transfer

Question

I am trying to clone a external hardrive ( 1.5T ) to a second one ( 3T ) with dd. I am working on Unix and want to create a disk image.

Here is the command I am using :

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/Volumes/FreeAgent\ GoFlex\ Drive\ DENISE/SeaGate_AC.dmg conv=noerror

I have used the following command to check the progress of my transfer:

kill -INFO 1880

At the beginning it was working correctly and here is an example of the output:

8576952+0 records in
8576952+0 records out
4391399424 bytes transferred in 658.085533 secs (6672992 bytes/sec) 

But after a while, the terminal is not answering and even my Finder is crashing when I am trying to access the destination HD.

I have tried with the option sync with the same result

Any suggestions are welcome...

Thanks Simon

Here is the output of dmesg as suggested by slm:

2Request - begin
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5: GetBufferDescriptor with buffer=0 dataSize=0 task=0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SCSITaskStatus 2
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SendCommand non-zero status,     check condition
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - senseSize 18, respCode 0x72,    senseKey 0x1, addlSenseCode 0x0, addlSenseQual 0x1d, addlLength 0xe
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - returning main line 0
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x12f7ed00]::externalMethod(2, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x12f7ed00]::externalMethod(9, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12)::UpdateSelfTestResults: using     IssueSmartDiagnosticStatus
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - begin
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5: GetBufferDescriptor with buffer=12ee1928 dataSize=200 task=0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SCSITaskStatus 0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - returning main line 1
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x12f7ed00]::externalMethod(2, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x12f7ed00]::externalMethod(10, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x12f7ed00]::externalMethod(1, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(0, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(23, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(1, 0x1102c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(0, 0x1152c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(24, 0x1442c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0x9ffc000]::externalMethod(1, 0x1442c70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(0, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(2, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(12, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12)::IssueSmartRequest: using IssueSmartReturnStatus
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - begin
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5: GetBufferDescriptor with buffer=0 dataSize=0 task=0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SCSITaskStatus 2
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SendCommand non-zero status,  check condition
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - senseSize 18, respCode 0x72,     senseKey 0x1, addlSenseCode 0x0, addlSenseQual 0x1d, addlLength 0xe
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - returning main line 0
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(2, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(9, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12)::UpdateSelfTestResults: using IssueSmartDiagnosticStatus
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - begin
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5: GetBufferDescriptor with buffer=12ee1928 dataSize=200 task=0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - SCSITaskStatus 0
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueSAT12Request - returning main line 1
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(2, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(10, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient00_10_5[0xa014600]::externalMethod(1, 0x112ac70, 0, 0, 0)
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12) handling stop request
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12) IssueModeSelectTimer: shortTime = 1
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12)::SetModeSelectTimer: using shortime
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12) IssueModeSelectTimer: complete
com_seagate_IOPowSec00_10_5-(NA0LVZ12): IssueStopUnderDeviceControlCommand
Warning: audit space low (< 5% free)on audit log file-system

My image file is about 17G...

UPDATE #1

Both drives are formatted as NTFS. The system they're mounted on is Mac OSX 10.6.8. The GoFlex software provided by Seagate is being used to access the 3TB drive.

The 1.5TB HDD is failing and during boot up Disk Utility is failing when scanning the drive.

Answer 1

I think your issue is that you're trying to write a master boot record (MBR) formatted drive, and MBR can only support up to 2TB.

You're going to have to format your 3TB drive using a GUID Partitioning Table (GPT) layout. I would suggest partitioning the 3TB drive using parted and then using clonezilla to copy the 2TB drive's data to the 3TB drive.