Re: recover data from a hd

[Borislav Petkov <petkov@uni-muenster.de>]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 11:44:31AM +0200, Philipp Pagel wrote:
> Borislav Petkov <petkov@uni-muenster.de> wrote:
> >  my hd died this morning and I know it is too late and I don't have a
> >  backup but is there a way to do a raw read and gather all the
> >  information that can be read? One thing might be kind of a problem, however, 
> >  since the hd is damaged at its very beginning and attempting to mount it gives
> >  I/O error on sector 0 and the consecutive ones. 
> 
> So the disk is not entirely dead as in not responding at all? Thats a
> start.
> 
Yeah, that's a good thing but I haven't had the time to experiment with
that a bit longer.
> >  So, is there a way to jump 
> >  after those erroneous sectors and read what's left. Any pointers would be 
> >  greatly appreciated, thanks!
> 
> The usual procedure is to copy the entire content of the disk into a
> file on another disk and then work with that - i.e. try to find
> partitions and files.
> 
> You can use dd for copying but dd will have trouble with unreadable
> sectors. You can tell dd to skip a certain number of block but that will
> only solve the problem, if the rest of the disk is readable.
> 
> I have heard that people have succeded using dd_rescue. From the package
> description:
> 
> "dd_rescue is a tool to help you to save data from crashed partition. It
> tries to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors where
> tools like dd will fail. If the copying process is interrupted by the
> user it is possible to continue at any position later. It can copy
> backwards."
I used that tool to recover files from cds so let's see how it performs
for hds.
> Sounds like this might be what you need. I have never used it, so don't
> blame me if it's not.
> 
> cu and good luck

> 	Philipp
 
Thanks, 
		off to buy a hd first for I don't have a spare hd to dump the
		data of the failed drive.