ddrescue There are two utilities that share this name, but the GNU one is far faster, and a lot easier to use effectively.
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html Its killer feature is the ability to keep a log showing what it has done and use that info to re-start an interrupted recovery or re-scan problem areas using different settings, etc. The log is a compact, human-readable and easily parsable text format describing ranges of blocks and their status. Anecdote: Recently, when my laptop's disk started throwing unreadable errors on my console, I immediately got a new drive and connected the failing one with a USB adaptor. I booted from a live CD and ran the old dd_rescue, as it was a tool I was already familiar with. However, last time I needed it, the largest disk I owned was 40GB - this one was 320GB. While I waited, I looked for info on any new tools or techniques, and found GNU ddrescue... Since the the old dd_rescue that I was running had already reported nearly 700MB of unreadable blocks at 10% progress after 4 hours... I gave GNU ddrescue a try and was very impressed! After three scans using different settings I was able to recover all but about 3MB from the failing disk in about 8 hours! -- -- Steve Scaffidi <step...@scaffidi.net> _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
