Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Success!
That’s a big win for ddrescue.
PC recovered, seems to be in full working order so far.
Now, for some memory.
My only wish is that I could buy memory as easily for my own brain.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Just a little geeky
I’ve been working on DW’s mom’s computer tonight. I’ve had it sitting in my office for the last 6 months or so.
It’s not that I can’t fix it, or that I’m lazy (at least this time it’s not about being lazy) it’s just that the couple of times I poked around on it, it came with the click of doom.
I’ve tried a couple imaging utilities (ghost, paragon) and both of them fail out around the same spot. I manually copied off the most important files (according to her), so I figured I could give something else a shot.
Enter ddrescue. It’s a Linux based tool that basically skips over bad sectors while copying, then goes back and does smaller and smaller reads until its recovered as much as possible. I’ve been meaning to give it a try for a while now, so we’ll see how it goes (about 70% done copying the drive to a new one at this point).
For the Linux neophytes, like myself, SystemRescue is a Linux (Gentoo) boot CD with ddrescue (and a bunch of other tools) installed in a live CD environment. Just boot, run the tool you want, and go, no install or real configuration skills involved.
Thus ends my recommendation, at least until I can see if it actually worked.