[ale] Fwd: Hard Drive Death Spiral -- AKA Recovery Software?

[Ed Cashin]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 4:06 PM, H P Ladds <householdwords at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:
>
>> If you aren't having read errors, all of the 100 MB files
>> would read successfully, and you'd be able to just cat them
>> together.
>
> ddrescue discovered 8 errors that are 4096 k in 115 gigs of data.
>
> In concept, I understand your suggestion:
>
> (A) Break the data into 100 MB chunks.
> (B) Reassembling  the data using a cat.

>From what others have said, it sounds like I basically
created a very slow stand-in for dd_rescue.  If you're
using ddrescue already, then you won't need to go through
the trouble I went through to get as much data as possible
off the drive in the face of errors.

But about "B" above, I didn't use cat, because I like
portable UNIX skills, so I try not to remember any options
that "cat" has.  I could have used dd with "conv=notrunc",
I think, but what I really used was a little program I wrote
for flexible reading and writing at file offsets.

I'll put that program, seekrw, on my website.

  http://noserose.net/e/code/seekrw.tar.gz

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>