Undelete or recover from badblocks on disks

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 10:17:31PM -0700, jaymax wrote:
> 
> Thanks Roland, 
> smartctl showed disk to be fine!
> fls requires a disk image, is there one created by default in FreeBSD 6.0 . 

No, you have to create one.

> Running fls in directory of deleted files/dir produced
> 
> > #fls -adr 2
> > Missing image file names (img_open)
> > 
> 
> Is there a solution to this ?

Create a disk image from the damaged drive, and save it on another disk with
enough space. You can use dd(1) to create a disk image. You can devide the
image into several files. For example, I will use dd to get two consecutive 10
MiB pieces from a disk partition on a USB stick:

# dd if=/dev/da0s1 of=dd1.img bs=1m count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 1.031497 secs (10165575 bytes/sec)
# dd if=/dev/da0s1 of=dd2.img bs=1m count=10 iseek=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 1.021128 secs (10268799 bytes/sec)

Without specifying it, dd uses 512 byte blocks. This can take along time,
because dd then needs to do a lot of small reads. Therefore I tend to specify
a larger block size. Note that 'bs=1m count=10' reads the save amount of data
as 'bs=10m count=1' and 'bs=1k count=10240'. Using a larger blocksize will
usually mean faster reads, but I do not know what the practical limits to
block sizes are. I would not start by using 'bs=1g', though.

The (valid, IMHO) reason for using disk images is that you want to investigate
a copy of the data, so you cannot accidentily destroy the original data.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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