If you receive an input/output error when copying a normal disk using dd in Linux, here are the steps you should take:
The situation is quite sad, but solvable. Most likely, you are dealing with a faulty disk that contains bad blocks that can no longer be used, written to, or read from.
Be sure to check such a disk using S.M.A.R.T., it will most likely show you disk errors. This was the case for me, the number of bad blocks was so large that I had to say goodbye to the old hard drive and replace it with a new SSD.
The problem was that this disk had a fully functional system with licensed software necessary for work. I attempted to use partimage to quickly copy the data, but found that the utility only copied a third of the disk, then terminated either with a segfault or some other amusing C/C++ quirk.
Then I tried copying the data using dd, and found that dd reached about the same point as partimage, then encountered an input/output error. Various fun flags like conv=noerr, skip, or other such things did not help at all.
However, I was able to copy the data to another disk without any issues using a GNU utility called ddrescue.
ddrescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1After that, my hair became silky, my wife returned, the kids, and the dog stopped biting the sofa.
A big advantage of ddrescue is the built-in progress bar, so there is no need to hack together some workarounds like pv and other not very pretty dd flags. Also, ddrescue shows the number of attempts to read the data; the wiki also says that the utility has some super algorithm for reading damaged data, we’ll leave that for people who like to dig into the source code, we are not among them, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html