Richard wrote:
On Monday 30 June 2008 11:28:38 am James Knott wrote:
Please explain how it's possible to repair a drive, but not copy with appropriate tools. If a sector is repairable, it's copyable. Once you have copied all the readable sectors, you can fix any damaged ones and also the file system etc.
Guys:
I have a question. If the drive is unuseable as it sits, how can you screw up anything by running Spinrite?
A friend who has used Spinrite on many bad drives says it cant hurt the drive but may take hours to diagnose and fix. He wouldnt hesitate to use it to recover your disk.
He says using the CD you let the cd boot and at the prompt you type spinrite then find something else to do until it finishes.
Also he's had 100% success with the program and that the MBR is a piece of cake. And if your drive is SMART capable, leave smart enabled will help do the job.
Richard
By copying the sectors to another drive, you may be able to fix defective sectors by using a sector editor. If you mess up, you just start again on a copy, without having to go back to the original drive. By fixing the defective sectors, you may now be able to recover the data. If you operate directly on the defective drive, a mistake may make data recovery impossible. Again, if you can read enough for Spinright to work, you can read enough to copy the sectors and working on a copy is always safer than on the original. Also, in order to copy the original sectors from a defective drive, you need the appropriate tools that will make multiple attempts to read a sector etc., instead of just passing over the error. Any decent sector repair tool should be able to do that. Someone else mentioned "dd_rescue". Here's a link to it: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue -- Use OpenOffice.org <http://www.openoffice.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org