Re: Disk recovery

[dsavage@peaknet.net]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 19:56 -0600, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> Jason V Smith wrote ..
> > it's just giving me some SMART alarms to backup my data.
>
> Get your data fast before it gets any worse.
> You should be able to turn off SMART in your BIOS.
>
> For recovery, I'd use dd_rescue, since it will skip bad
> blocks, ignore errors, and will let you read the data backwards.
>
> Avoid cpio, since hardware errors (like the SMART kind) will LOCK UP
> your system and cpio will retry forever. And cpio is not user-interruptable
> in the middle of a kernel read operation (which it will be, when you
> want to interrupt it, of course).

Jason,

Mike is bang-on with his suggestion to use dd_rescue when you've got hard
disk errors. I had 160 consecutive bad sectors on a laptop drive that
frustrated the use of any other utility to copy data to another drive.

Hint: the Helix v1.5 forensic CD
(http://www.e-fense.com/helix/index2.html) comes with a static compiled
version of dd_rescue already on-board. If you install that 160GB drive as
a slave then boot from the Helix CD, you can safely mount both hard drives
and use dd_rescue to rip partition images from your old drive to the new
(don't forget the MBR!).

Then I would suggest buying a second big drive (>100GB) to act as a
bare-metal destination to restore all images (including the MBR) using dd.
Once you have that in hand and working, you can delete the images from the
160GB drive and use it as a cpio destination as previously suggested.

-- Doc
Robert G. (Doc) Savage, BSE(EE), CISSP, RHCE | Fairview Heights, IL
Fedora Core 3 kernel 2.6.10-1.766_FC3 on a P-III/M IBM Thinkpad A22p
"Perfection is the enemy of good enough."
                         -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov

-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.