[ale] good link to keep

[Brandon Checketts]

Jim Kinney wrote:
> Hard drives fail. It's a fact of life. More to the point, it's the
> bane of every sys-admins existence.
> 
> I found this page with excellent data on working with dying hard
> drives and bad blocks and possible data/drive recovery.
> 
> http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html
> 

Worth noting is that GNU ddrescue [1] is an excellent tool for obtaining data
from a failing hard drive.  It create and exact duplicate replica of the data
similar to dd.  But where dd has to read everything sequentially, ddrescue will
will temporarily skip over failing sections of the disk to read all of the good
data available.  It will then go back to the problem areas and try to read them
in smaller and smaller chunks until it gets as much data as possible.

I recently used it to recover data from a 160 GB Drive.  The file system was
entirely unusable and attempts to copy anything from it with normal file system
tools, or any cloning utilities would fail miserably.   ddrescue was able to
read everything with the exception of about 5 MB of data from the disk.

1- http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts