Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue 1.3 - questions from a newbie

[Ariel]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, Matt Boge wrote:

> Hey guys,

> I don't want to be a pest, but if there is any chance someone could take 
> a few minutes and look at my questions below, I would definitely 
> appreciate it.  Again, I really appreciate what you have all done 
> already, but I'm kinda dead in the water right now and I'm a little 
> anxious about moving forward on my own.

> I have been checking out the rescued data using Knoppix, and while a lot 
> of data was saved, I noticed a huge glaring hole:  the My Pictures 
> folder was missing.  As you can probably imagine, this is one of the few 
> folders I really cared about rescuing and while I was expecting that 
> some of the data might be lost, I certainly wasn't expecting the entire 
> folder to not show up.

Seems that you had the disk failure where new writes fail, I guess you 
were writing a file to that directory?

Anyway the directory itself may be gone, but most likely all the files in 
it are still there. If you are using ntfs (not fat32) there is a change yu 
can save the file names, but otherwise you will lose the file names, but 
at least you will have the data.

Run checkdisk on it, and MAKE SURE you tell it to save lost clusters.

> Anyway, I think I'd like to give SpinRite a shot on the damaged drive to 
> see if I can eek out anymore data, but before I do (and possibly damage 
> the drive further), I want to be sure that the stuff I did pull off 
> already with ddrescue is safe.  In that vein, I want to have two copies 
> of the rescued data: one scratch drive (to add any potential new data 
> saved by SpinRite and updated by a second running of ddrescue) and one 
> "safe" copy that I can revert to if my scratch drive fiddlings go bad.

There is another reason to have a second disk: when you run checkdisk you 
may end up with less data then you would like, so if that happens you can 
revert back to your saved disk.

Also, before running spinrite, you may want to consider running ddrescue 
again, using the same logfile and settings etc (watch out if you moved the 
data because of your partition issue, I don't remember what you did).

It's possible ddrescue will be able to find more data - also this time 
turn on autosplit mode, I remember you had that off the first time.

And finally, after spinrite finishes, run ddrescue on the disk, again with 
the logfile - if spinrite managed to recover any bad sectors, then 
ddrescue will copy them, but it won't bother copying data that it already 
managed to get.

BTW: The first time I had a disk error it was 3weeks to a month before I 
was up and running again. The second time was quicker since I had raid 
(although it didn't help that I had 2 disks fail at the same time, and 
that Maxtor sent me a defective disk as a warranty replacement).

        -Ariel