Wednesday, February 25, 2009

ddrescue to the rescue

So two weeks ago my HD did a huge CRACK and it stopped working. The system did not boot up and it just did CRACK CRACK CRACK all the time. So i browsed a bit and saw that ddrescue was a dd variant able to skip failing sectors. So i picked up a new HD the double size of the old one and a RIP CD and started the process of dumping the old filesystem into a file. Two weeks after ddrescue told me i had lost 77MB and thankfully after dumping the file into a newly created filesystem and some fsck later i did not lost anything important.

So thanks a lot ddrescue devels!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Very nice find but no backup?

Anonymous said...

Sounds like you're in need of a backup solution!

I suggest rdiff-backup ( http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ )

However.... I'm working on an experimental and stupidly simple KDE backup and recovery system based on rdiff-backup. Hopefully it will see the light of day sometime in the near future.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic! Thanks for the tip.
(I hope I won't use it though ;) )

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the suggestion.

What gave you the confidence to use this potentially dangerous method, as opposed to sending it to one of those recovery services?

Albert Astals Cid said...

@Backup people: Too tedious, people just do backups after a hardware fail, it gets boring afterwards, though i'm thinking of a RAID setup.

@Jason: I'm not rich and the data was not that critical so a recovery service is not an option, besides Linux tools have always worked for me, so why would i need an "extra" of confidence before using them?