Block# to File Mapping?

[Ed Skinner]

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 12:42, you wrote:
> Can you attach the hard drive to another computer, run fsck and let it
> tell you what files are bad?  Use the option to preclude actual changes to
> the disk, just get the information from it.

     I'll probably do that on an "-o loop" mounted copy, not on the actual 
drive because one of the notes on the recovery tools (myrescue or dd_rhelp?) 
said that repeatedly reading from a bad area on the disk would cause it to 
get worse. I don't see how that could be but, nonetheless, I'm treating the 
disk very carefully until I've sucked out as much data as I can.
     Physics question: Does passing a wire through a magnetic field weaken it? 
If so, how do the magnetic domains in a disk's surface get replenished in 
areas that you read a lot? Heat?
     The rescue tools (such as myrescue) does a dd using a large block size 
(for speed) and leaves holes in the created copy where it can't read, then it 
goes back and tries smaller and smaller block sizes to recover as much as it 
can from the damaged area. I did the same thing manually about a year ago 
using just dd but that's a royal pain and very error prone. Tools are nice.

-- 
Ed Skinner, ed at flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/