[clug] HDD Recovery Services recommendations ?

[Michael James]

On 01/03/2012, at 9:48 PM, Hugh Blemings wrote:

> A friend of mine is in the unenviable situation of needing to get data recovered from two 1TB hard drives.  Yes, I know, backups, yes yes yes... :/
> 
> I've not sighted the drives myself but gather they're name brand USB external drives.  It's not clear to me if they are making horrible noises, or just not showing up on the machine they're connected to - clearly this represents two extremes of the depth of problem :(
> 
> The first port of call will be a careful inspection with some tools under Linux and not modifying anything on the drive.

IIIf the drive appears as a device, run

root>   smartctl --all  /dev/sdc

 and see if it's failing.
Assuming it really is, then the GNU version of ddrescue
 is the next step. Make sure you catch every byte,
 this may be the last time that it mounts.

If the data is really critical make a copy of the copy
 and start trying to run fsck against the 2nd copy
 keeping the master copy untouched.
Running fsck may fix things, or may break things.
Unless you run it against a flakey drive,
 then it's more likely to break things.

Given the amount of un-lamented cruft on drives,
 Murphy really has to have you in his sights
 for the critical data to be on the few KB that ddrescue can't get.

my $.02,
michaelj


-- 
Well theme my emoticons disgusted. What has Linux come to?
Michael James