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Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 18:30:26 -0600
From: Brad Davis <brd@FreeBSD.org>
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Subject: Re: Program to copy data from a bad disk?
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On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 05:03:09PM -0700, LI Xin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently my hard drive goes bad again, which has a lot of bad sectors 
> for unknown reasons.  I am looking for some software that is capable of 
> doing a sector-to-sector copy of the hard drive.
> 
> I have tried dd but with conv=noerror,sync it would just fill 0's for 
> the whole block size (say, in order to get best speed you will want 
> bs=128k or even larger, but that means that you will lose data  when 1 
> of these 256 sectors is bad).  Is there any program that is smarter 
> which do a sector-to-sector copy for these failed blocks and use larger 
> transfer buffer for others?

Hi Xin,

I recently found sysutils/dd_rescue and sysutils/ddrescue. I have never
tried them, but they are supposed to do what you want.


Regards,
Brad Davis