> My new 2TB HD just arrived. Old 1.5TB to be rescued, made in 2010, has
> 8 pending sectors reported by smartctl.
FWIW, there's a good chance that your old drive is still perfectly
usable: after backing up your data, a pass of overwriting the whole disk
(e.g. dd </dev/zero >/dev/sdXX) will probably bring the number of
"pending sectors" back to zero (if overwriting doesn't bring it down to
0, and/or overwriting itself fails with write errors that would indicate
that the disk is indeed in poor shape).
> 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?
dd_rhelp is an old shell script around the old dd_rescue program.
GNU ddrescue is a newer tool doing the same thing as dd_rhelp without
needing dd_rescue.
> Do Debian users simply extract the script from the lastest archive version on
> www.kalysto.org and run it?
No, I think they use GNU ddrescue instead.
Stefan
