I finally got to check on this.

First thanks to Geoff for his informative replies and to jmk for  
taking the
time to let me know Geoff was away. That saved me from checking my
email every 5 seconds looking for his posts.

I tried copyworm yesterday. I wasn't sure what device I was supposed to
use. First I made main fh0 and output fw2, but I got a message saying
something like `no blocks to copy from worm'. So, then I just made main
h0 and output w2. Copyworm ran and ended with (and I actually wrote the
message down this time):

wreniocmd out of range a=w2 b=6105859
wrenwrite: w2(6105859) bad status 0040
out block 6105859: write error; bailing copied 615859 blocks from h0  
to w2
sync: wormcopy
looping: reset the machine at any time

h0 is an 80G IDE drive (Western Digital something), and w2 is a Seagate
50GB U2WCS 3HH ST150176LC 1.6-IN HIGH 80-PIN
according to the seller's blurb.

I  wouldn't think 50 is just too small given that I only had a few GB  
of stuff and
have only been running since December.

I need to try the p(w2)1.99. I didn't have any intention of having an  
MBR
but maybe something there is the problem. Do you think that might help?
It takes almost 20hrs to complete the copy, so it's not an easy  
experiment
to do.

Anyway, any thoughts appreciated.

Greg




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It sounds like

        cannot add sd12!plan9 [63,156296385] to disk [0,976937355):
partition boundaries out of range

is coming from 9load.  I haven't seen this, but it does sound like
garbled partition tables or a bad disk.  The first block of a file
system contains its configuration block, so if you plan to have an MBR
or other DOS/FAT stuff on the disk, you'll need to skip it.  I do that
on my main file server to allow a small DOS partition.  To do so, use
p(w0)1.99 instead of w0, for example.

`panic: fworm: checktag 6105775' is quite serious.  The fake-worm
bitmap isn't initialised.  Copying fworms is tricky, particularly if
the output device is larger than the input device.  You probably ought
to use copyworm instead of copydev, since copydev just blindly copies
blocks, assuming input and output are the same size, but copyworm
knows how to copy fworms, including reaming the output fworm, thus
creating its bitmap.