hard drive recover operation

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 18:32:15 -0400,
  anthony baldwin <anthonybaldwin at optonline.net> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Last week I lost a hdd (bad blocks, I/O error no. 1117, I think)...It 
> was my main hdd, with a FC5 installation on it
> (the one I had trouble with libpam.so.0 today was a
> fresh install on a little partition I made on the old 15gb hard drive 
> that was sitting here rusting, with an XP install on it, which I am now 
> using
> since I haven''t yet resolved the libpam issue on that install, although 
> I have recieved instructions from the list on how to proceed.)
> And today, my new 200gb hdd arrived from the ebay seller.
> So, I am going to try and recover the old 80gb hdd with FC5 onto the new 
> one with a knoppix cd using ddrescue.
> I''ve really, really got to recover some important financial data on 
> there, and now, because I have an immigration
> appointment for my wife''s green card (she''s from Brasil)  in two 
> weeks, and I MUST have this data with me. (Last back up was
> almost 3 months ago now, and I need the full updated info.)
> This page: 
> http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-save-recover-data-from-crashed-disks-with-dd-and-ddrescue-command.html
> Says I should do fsck on the new drive after copying the old drive to 
> the new one, but my understanding is that running fsck on an ext3
> file system is a bad idea....I''m pretty sure someone, somewhere, on ce 
> told me that.  I haven''t actually run fsck
> in several years.
> Any advice?

If the data is really valuable, don't touch the drive and get a professional
data recovery company to recover it for you. If that is too expensive, then
you can try somne tricks yourself, but they could easily make it much harder
(and possibly costly as well) if you end up going to a professional later.
In particular you might try looking at freezing the disk drive to get a
little more life out of it. There are instructions on how to do that that
you should be able to find with google.

Running fsck on ext3 is normally fine. You might not want to do it on
a disk containing the only copy of your data though.

> Also, I am unsure whether it is better to simply copy the old hdd to the 
> new one, and then try to boot it,
> or, if I should do a fresh install on the new drive, but leave a 80gb 
> partition to copy the old hdd onto that partition,
> then boot the fresh install and attemp to access my data from there.

I think having an image of the bad drive (as best you can obtain) as a plain
file on the new drive would be best. You can make other copies easier that
way. Once you've done that you can copy over to a partition and try to use it.

> Because, otherwise, I don''t know how I''m going to save the data.  I 
> can''t copy any of it to cd while running from
> a knoppix cd, because there is only one cd/dvd drive.
> Any suggestions?
> 
> As always, any and all assistance appreciated....
> 
> tony
> 
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