Re: Trimming away bad sectors...

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> I have a feeling that instead of seeking out and analyzing a hacked PC
> for my SANS forensic certification, I just might write a paper on the
> use of dd_rescue in cases like this. There may yet be a silver lining
> around this dark cloud....

Join the club. I'm currently trying to fix a segfault in e2salvage (a different utility that rebuilds a horked EXT2FS image -- you know, like the one you've just recovered with dd_rescue... :=)

> After I've got all partition images
> safely onto the large drive array, I'm going to haul out my new hard
> drive toy and do a low level re-format of that 48G drive. It'll map out
> any bad sectors it finds, and re-certify it to "like new" condition.
> Some time tomorrow night I should be ready for a bare metal restoration.

Hey, can I borrow your toy when you're done? I've got this drive with a
similar problem. It's a WD 120GB less than a year old, so I have no idea why it's getting hard read errors being of recent vintage.

Other than the first FS on the drive, it works fine. The partition table is OK, and it goobered the primary superblock table. Like an idiot, I ran fsck, which promptly goobered the _rest_ of the superblock copies trying to "fix" things.

Then, SMART got ugly on me and told me I couldn't use that disk anymore. Some judicious surgery in the BIOS fixed the SMART-a55. But by then, it was too late.

So, e2salvage is my hope to rebuild the FS that *used* to be there, starting with zeroed out superblocks.

Oh, yeah. It's been fun. Now, I'm trying to install a new OS release (starts with an X), and it gets fooled by the fubar first partition and wants to wipe and clean-format the entire drive. Sorry. Ain't gonna do it.

In the meantime I've been applying security patch after upgrade after patch after patch ad-nauseum on a brand spankin' new XP Home box. God there's a lot of pre-installed crapware on it! Then there's the endless adware and links to even more crapware. And the first thing they do is require you to allow blanket access to your machine for convenient automatic updates and access to even more crapware.

If the software license explicitly claims that the software has no value whatsoever -- because it doesn't actually *DO* anything, according to the license, then I'm hard pressed to see exactly what the "value" exchanged in a binding contract might be. But that's a whole 'nuther topic....

Mike/

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