off topic - disk crash

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 11), Daniel Lang said:
> C. Kukulies wrote on Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 06:36:52PM +0100:
> [..]
> > The disk boots into FreeBSD but already at power on time the disk
> > does seek retries or some recalibration noise.
> > 
> > The question is what else can I do to recover the data. Put it in
> > the icebox? Turn the computer upside down?
> 
> Put it into another box running a working FreeBSD and enough
> disk-space to contain all the contents of the damaged disk.
> 
> Check if you can still read the disklabel (just do "disklabel ad1s1
> (or whatever your device is)).
> 
> If you can read the disklabel, grab the contents of each partition
> with dd, use the 'conv=noerror,sync' options to fill unreadable
> sectors with zeros.

Also, if it looks like a single bad area of the disk, try a dd starting
a couple megs past the bad spot (with iseek+oseek) if the drive stops
responding after it hits the bad area.  I recovered data from a failed
disk this way.



-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com