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>

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