hard drive recover operation

[Robin Laing]

anthony baldwin wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Last week I lost a hdd (bad blocks, I/O error no. 1117, I think)...It 
> was my main hdd, with a FC5 installation on it
> (the one I had trouble with libpam.so.0 today was a
> fresh install on a little partition I made on the old 15gb hard drive 
> that was sitting here rusting, with an XP install on it, which I am now 
> using
> since I haven''t yet resolved the libpam issue on that install, although 
> I have recieved instructions from the list on how to proceed.)
> And today, my new 200gb hdd arrived from the ebay seller.
> So, I am going to try and recover the old 80gb hdd with FC5 onto the new 
> one with a knoppix cd using ddrescue.
> I''ve really, really got to recover some important financial data on 
> there, and now, because I have an immigration
> appointment for my wife''s green card (she''s from Brasil)  in two 
> weeks, and I MUST have this data with me. (Last back up was
> almost 3 months ago now, and I need the full updated info.)
> This page: 
> http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-save-recover-data-from-crashed-disks-with-dd-and-ddrescue-command.html 
> 
> Says I should do fsck on the new drive after copying the old drive to 
> the new one, but my understanding is that running fsck on an ext3
> file system is a bad idea....I''m pretty sure someone, somewhere, on ce 
> told me that.  I haven''t actually run fsck
> in several years.
> Any advice?
> Also, I am unsure whether it is better to simply copy the old hdd to the 
> new one, and then try to boot it,
> or, if I should do a fresh install on the new drive, but leave a 80gb 
> partition to copy the old hdd onto that partition,
> then boot the fresh install and attemp to access my data from there.
> Because, otherwise, I don''t know how I''m going to save the data.  I 
> can''t copy any of it to cd while running from
> a knoppix cd, because there is only one cd/dvd drive.
> Any suggestions?
> 
> As always, any and all assistance appreciated....
> 
> tony
> 

As I see it, the drive will still read but gave you some block errors.

I would leave the old 15Gig drive as the OS.  There are benefits to 
doing this.

Use the new 200gb as the /home drive.

Get the new install working and then mount the old FC drive and try to 
copy the old /home data to the new /home drive.

I have done this in the past.  If the bad block only causes problems 
when you read that block, you may be able to recover all but the one 
block of data.

You can also make an image of the drive and use one of the forensic tools.

As there is a problem with the drive, I wouldn't try to just copy across 
to the new installation.
-- 
Robin Laing