Paladin declaimed: > Hi, > > One of my drives (the least important, thank God!) failled recently. > Since I can't afford taking it to some company that recovers data I > was thinking of using software to try to recover the best I could. > I found a very good program named my_rescue that does some of the dd > work, but if it founds a bad cluster skips it a continues to get the > rest of the data. It also saves the status of it's work so you can > try at a latter time to recover that data that you didn't get the > first time. The problem now is that BIOS doesn't always recognize > the drive. :/ > And that brings me to the question: > > Do you know of any program that allows access to a drive bypassing > the BIOS? > > BTW, would you recommend RAID5 using an entire disk and two > partitions of another? (If it's even possible to do that...) > Putting on my "ten years of experience working for a backup software company" hat, here's my take:
1. If the BIOS doesn't always recognize the drive, then you have one of three problems: bad BIOS, bad cable, bad drive. Since the drive has already failed once, you're pretty sure it's the third reason. Try swapping/re-seating the cables or reconfiguring the master/slave relation on your IDE bus. If the problem persists then it's time to start using that drive for a doorstop, bookend, or other purpose suitable to its proven reliabilty. 2. No inherent problems with using RAID 5 as you describe, but if the performance and reliability benefit gained by using a RAID is worth the extra work setting it up and recovering when things really go wrong, then it should be worth plunking down a few hundred $ for two brand new identical high-performance, high reliability drives. Unless you just want to set up a RAID for the practice, of course. HTH, Paul -- Paul Mackinney [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
