[olug] drive recovery

[Eric W. Biederman]

Tim Larson <telrsn at gmail.com> writes:

> Anyone had good luck with a data recovery service? I’ve got a drive
> with the Click O Death I need to salvage files from.

What I have always done is copy the entire drive into a file with dd
aka:
	dd if=/dev/bad-drive of=bad-drive.bin conv=noerror

Compress my original backup so it doesn't take too much space
	gzip bad-drive.bin
        
Create a copy of the file

	zcat bad-drive.bin.gz > bad-drive.bin

The fsck the copy

	fsck bad-drive.bin

The loopback mount it (to get the files you want off)

	mount -o loop bad-drive.bin ~/tmp

Usually by the time a drive dies my new drives have been significantly
larger so it wasn't a problem.

There is a newer utility ddrescue that deals with the annoying bits of
damaged sectors, so I would definitely recommend starting with that.

The important point from perspective is just creating a copy of the data
onto another drive so you can get what is salvageable off, separately
from dealing with the broken drive.

Eric