On 3/15/18, Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote: > My new 2TB HD just arrived. Old 1.5TB to be rescued, made in 2010, has 8 > pending > sectors reported by smartctl. e2fsck locks up the PC trying to fix its EXT2 > filesystem. I know if anything could bail me out, dd_rhelp could. > > Debian bugs Google found about dd_rhelp: > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=252198 > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=254759 > > I see gddrescue in the repos, but my experience with dd_rehelp is only > favorable. Can someone tell me how they compare, or even if they are > comparable? > Do Debian users simply extract the script from the lastest archive version > on > www.kalysto.org and run it?
Hi, Felix.. I don't have that answer you need, but I tried doing some "apt-cache search" on your various forms of "dd_help". "safecopy" came up for "dd help rescue" so I'm throwing it out there in case it offers features of interest. This part of safecopy's description stood out for me: "This media can be floppy disks, harddisk partitions, CDs, DVDs, tape devices, where other tools like dd would fail due to I/O errors." I'm familiar with seeing those I/O errors. How safecopy actually works in reality, I don't know, but I do have an old, damaged hard drive with really important files trapped on it. I might try to find that old hard drive and give safecopy a shot myself, actually.. :) +++ SAFECOPY DESCRIPTION +++ Description-en: data recovery tool for problematic or damaged media Safecopy tries to get as much data from SOURCE as possible, even resorting to device specific low level operations if applicable. This is achieved by identifying problematic or damaged areas, skipping over them and continuing reading afterwards. The corresponding area in the destination file is either skipped (on initial creation that means padded with zeros) or deliberately filled with a recognizable pattern to later find affected files on a corrupted device. The work is similar to ddrescue, generating an image of the original media. This media can be floppy disks, harddisk partitions, CDs, DVDs, tape devices, where other tools like dd would fail due to I/O errors. . Safecopy uses an incremental algorithm to identify the exact beginning and end of bad areas, allowing the user to trade minimum accesses to bad areas for thorough data resurrection. . Multiple passes over the same file are possible, to first retrieve as much data from a device as possible with minimum harm, and then trying to retrieve some of the remaining data with increasingly aggressive read attempts. . Safecopy includes a low level I/O layer to read CDROM disks in raw mode, and issue device resets and other helpful low level operations on a number of other device classes. . Safecopy is useful in forensics investigations and disaster recovery. +++ END SAFECOPY DESCRIPTION +++ Good luck, whatever you end up using.. :) Cindy :) -- Cindy-Sue Causey Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA * runs with duct tape *
