Well let me just say that an ENORMOUS blue ribbon goes out to Jeff Green for his suggestion of using dd_rescue! It's taken me a few days to run through the entire process (mostly because I've been preoccupied with family Christmas activities) of recovering my old hard disk but dd_rescue did the trick! After letting dd_rescue run (it took a long time) I then ran fsck -y on the new image (which also took a long time) and was able to mount the drive! At first I was dismayed because the new drive image was empty except lost+found. But lost+found had loads of stuff and I was eventually able to locate my old home directory and copy out the files I was looking for! woohoo! I never did have to resort to the "drive in the freezer trick" but thanks to everyone who made suggestions and as I said, the biggest thanks to Jeff Green! Merry Christmas! -- John Lange BigHostBox.com (204) 885 0872 On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 08:32, Jeff Green wrote:
Hello,
I have had some success recovering data from a bad hard drive using a program called 'dd_rescue' (find it here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) which is basically like 'dd' but will continue copying even if there are bad blocks (by skipping them). So you may be able to make a mountable disk image of your drive (assuming the mechanical parts still work well enough to copy enough data), though you may have to 'fsck' the image. It is important to note that "forcing" the drive to continue to read when there are errors has the potential to cause even greater damage to the drive.
Jeff Green
On December 19, 2003 05:47 pm, John Lange wrote:
Thanks to everyone that replied with suggestions. Great response!
I've never heard of the freezer thing before. I'm going to give it a whirl! If I manage to recover anything I'll be sure to inform the group what I've learned.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Regards,
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