[NBLUG/talk] Recovering data from a failing hard disk

[Kyle Rankin]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 05:51:42PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> I need to transfer a huge volume of data from a failing 160GB hard disk
> to a new one of the same size.  I'm thinking that the following would do
> the trick:
> 
> find -print0 | xargs -0 --replace=FILE dd conv=noerror if=FILE of=/new/disk/FILE
> 
> Is there a better way?
> 
> ---
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
> 
> BOFH excuse #384:
> 
> it's an ID-10-T error
> 
> 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that for what you are needing to do
(image a failing drive to an identical drive) that dd /is/ what you want to
use--or at least a dd-like program. You want to do block-for-block copies
and not worry about the filesystem underneath, but with something like
dd_rescue that can ignore any errors your hard drive might be spitting out.

I covered this recently on my blog actually:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5205

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org