[WBEL-users] Server hard disk failure

[Edward Rudd]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:02, Kirby C. Bohling wrote:
[snip]
> First, go get a new disk.  Put both the disks into a machine with
> other boot media (either a Rescue CD, or another linux system).
> Copy from the problem drive to the other drive.  Using "dd" more
> then likely.  If you can't make the copy, unless the drives is worth
> shipping to a speciality data recovery shop, you are are probably
> stuck.  If I was doing this, I'd have a fourth drive, I'd copy the
> good drive, to the second good drive.  I've had dying drives that
> were only good enough to make a copy once.

Another option is dd_rescue (not the gnu.org one and dd_rhelp.
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/ and
http://www.kalysto.org/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html

I have WBEL3 srpms/rpms if you would like them.

Basically running dd_rhelp /dev/hda2 home.img (assuming hda2 has your
"/home" partition)  this will continually try copying the entire
partition to another harddrive and when it comes into read errors from a
failing harddrive it will start from a different area of the disk (and
go backwards). it will continue narrowing down the bad spots and retry
them. when dd_rhelp finishes (or you decide that it's found all it can
find, but i can take a while if there are bad blocks on the disk). then
just run fsck on the newly created image and mount it with -o loop.

#  fsck home.img
#  mkdir OldSys
#  mount home.img OldSys -o loop

I've used this utility on several drives that have gone bad and
retrieved all the data back.
[snip]

-- 
Edward Rudd <eddie at omegaware.com>
Website http://www.outoforder.cc/