hard drive recover operation

[anthony baldwin]

Robin Laing wrote:

> anthony baldwin 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?
>> 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.
>> 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
>>
>
> 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.