29 November 2006
Read data off of a dead hard drive?
Sooner or later we all encounter a crashed or bad hard drive, for those who have had a Compaq, especially during the early 90's, it may have been sooner than later. The problem in such situations is how to get the data off of the drive. The trick of freezing the drive has been mentioned several times as a way to make the drive readable in order to get data off of it, but the problem is how do you get the information off?
For Linux users, dd_rescue is an option. It will read the drive and when it encounters an error will skip to the next sector hopefully bypassing the error and getting more data. Later it is possible to read those failed sectors backwards to try to get more data from them and to use smaller block sizes, which will isolate the problem in an even smaller area. There may still be some missing data after all of this, but you will have most of it in one large file. This file can later be mounted and read onto another drive to get at least most of the data back and on another drive.
There is a very nice article describing how to use the utility as well as giving options on where to find it.
For Linux users, dd_rescue is an option. It will read the drive and when it encounters an error will skip to the next sector hopefully bypassing the error and getting more data. Later it is possible to read those failed sectors backwards to try to get more data from them and to use smaller block sizes, which will isolate the problem in an even smaller area. There may still be some missing data after all of this, but you will have most of it in one large file. This file can later be mounted and read onto another drive to get at least most of the data back and on another drive.
There is a very nice article describing how to use the utility as well as giving options on where to find it.
Labels: harddrive, linux, recover
