#linux

Spell of the day:
ntfsclone --rescue -f --overwrite /dev/sdb3 /dev/sda3

(clones the contents of partition sda3 to the (empty ntfs) partition sdb3)

nice. :)

ntfsclone couldn't cope with the errors this time. Spell of the next day:
./ddrescue -v /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 loki

(that is, input from sda3, output to sdb3. Read all you can, make a logfile of the error sectors and try them again later)

ddrescue had to be installed from the net, found by googling: ddrescue gnu

Wow!
Just last night my HD started giving bad sectors and I've got this ahead as well, gonna go grab a new HD in a minute.

Booted persistent Xubuntu from USB stick, but ntsfclone had some probs, need to look into that over the weekend.

Victory! After a few days worth of copying, windows sees the ddrescued partition again and could repair it. Nothing of value was lost. Here's a copypaste from the final moment of ddrescue:

Nice tricks! Still I use spinrite first, fixing HD-problems "behind the scenes"

Well, it's well hyped and packaged, but not as effective. Whatever works for you. I opt for free solutions that can be further deployed or used without license issues.

http://serverfault.com/questions/5168...

I have used it 3 times, fixed 2 of them.

@Neva Thanks for this thread, I've now done the same process:

rescued: 40887 MB, errsize: 65536 B, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 5362 MB, errors: 26, average rate: 11017 kB/s
opos: 5362 MB

Victory! Few proggies need reinstalling, but the most important (EVE Online) is fully functional and I'm not getting BSODs anymore.
Yes. This WinXP machine is for gaming purposes :D

Second case - a Vista laptop with many 10's of GBs of missing data. Has been in use for a month and even been defragmented during that time (major ouch). Will try to see if there's anything salvageable..

First, booted the laptop with Knoppix and made a dd-copy of the relevant partitions to an external 500GB USB-HD. 250GB internal laptop drive. Made the partitions graphically with sudo gparted & then copy - paste - cancel. This was to ease the fdisk sector tweaking.

With the receiver partitions in place on the external HD, gave this command to make a full duplicate of the partitions:
dd if=/dev/sda2 conv=noerror,sync bs=64k | dd of=/dev/sdb2 bs=64k

That is, read data from the partition sda2, ignore errors, read 64kb blocks and pad with 0's in the end if necessary. Then write the piped output simultaneously to sdb2 with the same blocksize.

This gave a transfer rate limited by the slowest component in the chain, be it a hard drive or the usb bus. Transfer speed was 25,1 MB/s

Copying done, running DIY iRecover on the imaged drive. Shareware version allows restoring of 1 folder/run, or any number of pictures (not limited).
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecove...

Looked at the original comp a bit more, and found zipped backup files on D:-drive. It'll take some extracting, but the missing data seems to be there in the automatic backups.