[TriLUG] OT: Laptop Hard Drive

[Charles Mangin]

I've followed this thread off and on, so if this has already been mentioned, please forgive.

For doing data rescue with ddrescue a helper script called DD_rhelp is super handy. It automates the process of skipping over damaged sections, then backing up to recover the good bits. It's my goto for data rescue on drives that aren't so damaged they need more hardcore techniques. 
-- 
Charles Mangin
option8 at option8.com

David Burton <ncdave4life at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net>
>wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, David Burton wrote:
>>
>>  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.
>>>
>>
>> if sector 0,1 and 3 are OK, but sector 2 is not, what does ddrescue
>do on
>> the target piece of disk? write 0,1, then hop over 2 leaving whatever
>junk
>> was there and then write 3?
>
>
>Yes.
>
>Note, however, that the ddrescue "log file" keeps track of which
>sectors
>have been recovered and which have not.  I.e., you can tell the
>difference
>between the recovered data and "whatever junk was there."
>
>In recent versions of ddrescue there is also a "--fill" option that can
>be
>used to write zeros to unrecovered sectors; see "fill mode" in the
>documentation:
>http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html
>(A variant of the --fill option does the opposite: aim it at the bad
>drive,
>and it writes zeros everywhere except the bad sectors, so that you can
>return the drive for warranty replacement and it will still test bad,
>but
>will not contain any of your data.)
>
>Also, some versions of Linux (including Parted Magic) apparently don't
>let
>ddrescue access individual sectors, even with the the -d option
>specified.
>On those versions of Linux, the granularity is usually 4kb (8 sectors),
>so
>if any of the 8 sectors in a cluster are unreadable the other 7 are
>unrecovered, as well.
>
>Dave
>-- 
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