----- Original Message ----- From: "linux r" <linuxr@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 7:27 PM
Subject: Re: hard disk crash
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:06 +0100, James Wilkinson <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Emiliano Brunetti wrote: > I am running FC1 and one of my hdd crashed: i can't even mount it.
"linux r" suggested: > 3. dd it to another removable device, preferably another (USB > external) hard drive so that you don't run into weird geometry issues > or other time consuming things. > Emiliano replied: > I never really used dd. After i copy the whole partition to another > hopefully healthy drive, can't i just zap everything away from the old > damaged drive and format it? I just wish i could save some of the data. > > Is this correct?
Once you've made *sure* you've got everything you can.
You should be in paranoia mode here. Your data may be there, or it may not. Keep as many copies as you can: the last thing you want to do is to mess up a command and lose your "good" copy.
Incidentally, one of the easiest commands to mess up is dd: make sure you get the if= and the of= devices right. It's too common for someone to get one of these wrong (or put the of device against if= and vice versa), and copy over something they really wanted to keep.
I wouldn't do anything to that hard drive until you're happy you've got everything into its new home and properly backed up.
And I wouldn't fully trust it, even then.
Hope this helps,
James.
--
E-mail address: james | I suppose if one has to go mad, slowly is the way to
@westexe.demon.co.uk | go. You wouldn't want to rush going mad, you might
| miss some of the good bits.
| -- Paul Tomblin
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To make it faster, can you just do just _part_ of the directory tree with dd? E.g., not do a 70 g partition of / when you can maybe scrap your apps and just dd /home or something like that. Later you can remount /home over your fresh install, or mount it in /tmp and cp over what you need. I would think that you could get by a lot quicker that way. Unless of course we are talking about a production box or something like that. If you don't need to save log files, etc. then this may be a way to cut down the territory considerably.
Marc
I was reading about dd_rescue http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/ when I was faced with a dilema copying from one drive to another recently, fortunately I got away with gnu parted and copied them across and then reworked it from there. I had multiple attempts with a redundant disk before finally commiting so it's well worth doing the research to get it right with a disk that doesn't matter until you get the right solution. Especially when you look at the prices of disks these days.
Hope you can recue your data.
Bry
