[Gllug] Dying hard disk

[Jonathan Dye]

I have a hard drive that is dying, it's still running but it keeps giving
unreliable reads and SMART is reporting it's on the way out.  I have a new
disk that I want to copy as much data onto before the original dies.  Every
time I try and copy the data across (tried Norton Ghost and dd) it gives up
at some point and I have to start again.  I wondered if anyone knew of any
tools that would help me with this.

I once used a DOS program that read each sector several times and did
statistical analysis to work out what the data probably was.  Unfortunatly
this wrote it back to the disk (in another position) and marked the original
sector as bad so was mainly for bad sectors rather than dying disks.

Before you suggest I restore from backups, this drive is not backed up.
This is because it's not the end of the world if we loose it, just
inconvenient and it was decided that the inconvenience was more acceptable
than the cost of a backup scheme.

JD

_____________________________________________________________________
This message has been checked for all known viruses by the 
MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug