hard drive recover operation

[Robin Laing]

anthony baldwin wrote:
> Robin Laing wrote:
> 
>> anthony baldwin wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings,
>>> tony
>>>
>>
>> As I see it, the drive will still read but gave you some block errors.
> 
> 
> 
> Actually, the /boot and swap partitions read, but the entire 74gb 
> partition with
> both OS and data is chock full of superblocks and is not reading.
> I did try to read the old 80gb from a FC5 install on the 15gb, with no 
> success.
> 
> I read (on the page referenced above) that dd_rescue would copy the data 
> without
> emulating the bad blocks, and that I would then be able, possibly, to 
> read the data again.
> Hmmm...I think perhaps I will do as you suggest in reference to using 
> the smaller drive for
> the OS...
> Then again, I was thinking about using it to install and try out 
> Kubuntu, after all this is over.
> 
> tony
> 
>>
>> I would leave the old 15Gig drive as the OS.  There are benefits to 
>> doing this.
>>
>> Use the new 200gb as the /home drive.
>>
>> Get the new install working and then mount the old FC drive and try to 
>> copy the old /home data to the new /home drive.
>>
>> I have done this in the past.  If the bad block only causes problems 
>> when you read that block, you may be able to recover all but the one 
>> block of data.
>>
>> You can also make an image of the drive and use one of the forensic 
>> tools.
>>
>> As there is a problem with the drive, I wouldn't try to just copy 
>> across to the new installation.
> 
> 
> 

Ouch.

With the larger drives it is a real pain if one dies.  Try making an 
image of a 250GB drive to play with.

I played with different recovery programs for a 2gig SD card that got 
trashed with original photos.  It took a lot of time to get the pictures 
off of but it was only a minor issue.

Search for other forensic software to try.  A few that I have tried 
won't write to the same drive that the image file is on.  Part of the 
"security" features.

http://www.linux-forensics.com/links.html
http://www.sleuthkit.org/

Good luck.

-- 
Robin Laing