Fwd: Drive crash

[Matt Graham]

From: Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net>
> On 10/05/2011 12:17 PM, AZ Pete wrote:
>> Does anyone have recommendations for a data recovery business,
>> preferably here in the valley. My external drive isn't working.
>> Seagate wants $600 for data recovery
> Have Jim email me. I might be able to help him out, for a reasonable
> fee.

I've also done stuff like this a couple of times.  Results obtainable with
*just* dd_rescue and fsck vary widely depending on how many bad sectors are on
the disk.  The more actual bad sectors, the more likely you won't recover
much.  The last disk I tried to recover, roughly 25% bad sectors meant a
filesystem that was basically beyond fsck's capability to fix.

Also, if the disk is marginal, trying to read from it may increase the number
of bad sectors if/when you decide to try doing more expensive hardware-based
recovery.  The first thing I'd try is to plug the disk in to a Linux box
without any sort of automount utility running and try to read the first few
sectors with dd.  Bad sectors there = bad prognosis.  No errors = try mounting
the first partition, go from there.  Errors = try dd_rescueing the partition
to a known good disk so you have a copy, then run fsck or other tools on a
copy of the copy.  Simple to think about.  More difficult to *DO* and get
useful junk back....

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see