hard disk failure - now what?

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:13:22 -0600, Tim Judd <tajudd at gmail.com> wrote:
> If I were you, get a copy of spinrite (from grc.com) and always keep
> it handy.  It can be risky on a drive already failing.  Here's what
> I'd do....
> 
> Buy spinrite, no matter what.

Is it really such a good tool? From my own problems, I researched
that common recovery tools are "R-Studio" and "UFS Explorer". Both
do not natively run on BSD, but the first one offers a bootable
CD. Without buying, you can run the diagnostics mode fullwise.
For recovery, you need to buy the program.

The "Spinrite" web page reads as follows:

	The industry's #1 hard drive data recovery
	software is NOW COMPATIBLE with NTFS,
	FAT, Linux, and ALL OTHER file systems!

What? Linux and other file systems?

Is this just marketing, in order to look good to the not very
educated ones? Or do they not know what they're talking about?

In fact, I will keep an eye on this program. Maybe it can help me
get my data back (inode defect of $HOME entry). I'm reading their
web page some more right now.



> slave the bad drive, read-only mount..  even if the FS is dirty,
> read-only.. no fsck.

You can at least do one fsck run without any modification options,
like a "read only file system check". This of course can - like
any read operation on the disk - be risky if the disk is fast
degrading, simply by using it.





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...