draklive-install teaching me a lesson I think - I am in trouble

[Just17]

Big question why did I have to run it more than once?

It might appear as if the connection is being lost? .....  but I would expect an error report if that were the case .....  so seems more like the data is being sent to the drive, accepted by it, but failing to write it ........ ? 

I think you might end up wiping the MBR/Partition table of the drive, maybe even zeroing the complete drive and then reconstructing it .......  at least from that point you would know the base you are working from ....

[wedgetail]

Just18
Your comment about the "expected an error" has been on my mind as well. Doing a dd on a 1GB drive is not something I would do with relish , though Old-Polack has reported good success with that.  I am trying to find SMART mon I thought I had seen it in Synaptic but I have not found it searching for SMART or S.M.A.R.T and I thought I would have look with that first. I got sidetracked and forgot when I spotted an interesting printer problem as well as a few members discussing DTVB  

The rsync I was not happy with having to rerun the statement, since it worked though I decided I might just think it over and see if some leads might pop up from others.  I have also spent time cleaning out many liveHDD installs on the problem drive so many in fact that I need a break and then go back and check my boot stanzas and see which still relate to an install.  More maintenance on the drive could reduce the number of used partitions so perhaps the idea of transferring to another drive might not be so daunting.