hard disk failure - now what?

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
> Kelly Martin <kellymartin at gmail.com> writes:
> > I just experienced a hard drive failure on one of my
> > FreeBSD 7.2 production servers with no backup!
...
> First, try copying the entire disk, *without* mounting it.

Yep.

> Use dd(1) to get a copy of the whole disk.  I believe that
> "conv=noerror" may be necessary.

Much better:  use sysutils/ddrescue, which was written
specifically to deal with this sort of situation.