May 7 of 2013 is one of the best moments of my life. Yanni arrived in Beijing, and we were able to be there at his convert. What a wonderful night!

And one of my friend took his camera that night to capture the amazing moments. And I must admit I was too noisy for him to catch a less disturbing music concert. Anyway, it recorded my passion and Yanni’s delicate and sublime and beautiful musics.

Data Broken!

But nothing can be too perfect! (Is this because in perfectness there is already a too?) 30 minutes of data cannot be played or even get copied via cp or dd due to a I/O error, though the camera itself can play all the files normally.

I used badblocks to find all the bad blocks in the card, and carefully used dd to avoid reading those blocks of data, using /dev/zero to fill them in. After this, a simple cat a b c > full and mount -o loop full /mnt will help open all the files. Mission accomplished!

The SD card was 32G, and using cp or dd gives no literally no output, letting us unable to know how long we are gonna wait. Most of my times I use gcp for this kind of big files, and since for this I had to use dd, I looked up the internet for showing progress in dd. And I found a way to do it.

Basically run the dd, and then send a USR1 SIGNAL to its process.

To illustrate, you run the following (valid, but perhaps not very useful) dd copy:

    # It will run for a few minutes as it copies (and immediately discards)
    # 100 blocks of randomly generated data, each of size 1 KB. 
    $ dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1K count=100 

    # To get a progress report while dd is running, you need to open
    # another virtual terminal, and then send a special USR1 signal to the dd
    # process.
    $ pgrep -l '^dd$'
    8789 dd
    # To send the USR1 signal to the dd prcoess:
    $ kill -USR1  8789

    # After reporting the status, dd will resume copying. You can repeat the above
    # kill command any time you want to see the interim statistics. Alternatively,
    # you can use the watch command to execute kill at a set interval.
    $ watch -n 10 kill -USR1 8789

I found out another similar way to watch the progress of the process using the virtual filesystem /proc/. For the porpose described above, simply run:

    $ cat /proc/8789/io

The output is not exactly the same with what you’d have using USR1 SIGNAL, but it is much better than having nothing to look at when you are having a cup of coffee.