[TriLUG] OT: Laptop Hard Drive

[David Burton]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:

>
> I do this for 2 reasons, neither of which I've needed.
>
> o if ddrescue partially recovers a sector with almost all 0's, I know I
> can ignore it.
>

ddrescue will never recover part of a sector.  SpinRite will do that, but
ddrescue either recovers a sector or it doesn't, nothing in-between.

However, there's another benefit to having the empty sectors zeroed.  If
you use ddrescue to recover to an image file on an ext3 partition, you can
use the -S (sparse) option and ddrescue will use the ext3 filesystem's
"sparse file" facility to not take up space storing the zeroed sectors.  So
you may find that you can recover an entire 2 TB hard disk drive into an
image file on a much, much smaller scratch drive without running out of
space, in case you don't happen to have spare 2 TB hard disk drives just
laying around collecting dust.

Dave