dd_rescue to the rescue
Fire up the email client (thunderbird), clunk – chunk….
Blue Screen
Unable to write to drive C:
Data may be lost
Sombitch!
Close a couple of programs, again:
Blue Screen
Unable to write to drive C:
Data may be lost
Hit the power button. I have a 10g drive that I can throw in here. I just have to get it.
(two days later) Cool, it’s a 30g drive, not 10g like I thought. Now…. gently place the Knoppix CD in the drive – change BIOS to boot from the CD and we’re started.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
Failing with drive/seek errors… crap!
Pull out the laptop and do a quick google search for copy failing hard disk with dd and amazingly, on a site for Tivo users I find the answer – dd_rescue. It’s on the Knoppix CD. I type in the commands – just like written on the board and a short time later it’s done.
Ok… time to shut the computer off, unplug the bad drive, put the second drive back into the machine (it’s in a removable tray so it’s easy to pull out – preventing stupid mistakes like writing over the wrong hard drive), and boot up. Ah… the familiar if agonizing Windows splash screen. I’m alerted to the fact that Windows will scan the drives for errors because it was not properly shutdown (yeah no shit – unable to write to drive C:) A little more work, such as rebooting to DOS adding the rest of the drive using fdisk (sorry, trying to. DOS FDISK couldn’t handle the drive I had to go back to Knoppix) , fire up to Windows, format the drive, then run scandisk and defrag… wait Windows scandisk and defrag suck – at least in 9x which is on this box – it was the MacAffee tools that did the job.
So far everything seems ok. dd_rescue showed less than 1mb bad data and the machine is running again. Next time a drive fails (or starts to) I’m pulling out dd_rescue.
