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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:38:59 -0700
From: perryh@pluto.rain.com
To: kellymartin@gmail.com
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: hard disk failure - now what?
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Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
> Kelly Martin <kellymartin@gmail.com> writes:
> > I just experienced a hard drive failure on one of my
> > FreeBSD 7.2 production servers with no backup!
...
> First, try copying the entire disk, *without* mounting it.

Yep.

> Use dd(1) to get a copy of the whole disk.  I believe that
> "conv=noerror" may be necessary.

Much better:  use sysutils/ddrescue, which was written
specifically to deal with this sort of situation.