Copying A Disk

[Chris Mohler]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Pete Holsberg <pjh42 at pobox.com> wrote:
> Chris Mohler wrote:
>> You posted this line from your log:
>> Jul 11 21:32:36 Ubu kernel: [ 5816.770911] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached
>> SCSI disk
>>
>> So running:
>> sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
>> and entering 'p' should show you the partition table.  If you've
>> unplugged/replugged or left it idle, you may want to unplug/replug
>> once more and look at the tail of /var/log/messages and make sure the
>> device is still being attached at /dev/sdb.  Look for the "Attached
>> SCSI disk" message like above.
>>
>> If you can't get fdisk to read the disk/partitions, that's bad news.
>> At that point I'd run dd_rescue against the whole disk and cross my
>> fingers (ddrescue /dev/sdb ~/disk_image).  If you get enough data, you
>> could then use dd to write the disk image directly to another hard
>> disk - but be sure that the target drive contains nothing that you
>> want to keep!!!  Writing the disk image directly to disk will
>> overwrite anything on the target disk, including the partition table.
>> And of course the target disk needs the same or greater capacity than
>> the original, damaged disk.
>
> Thanks, Chris. ddrescue terminated with 0 bytes rescued! I guess this is
> toast, as someone suggested.
>
> Thanks for your help and patience.

No problem.  You can try the freezer method as Brian mentioned.  I've
never had to resort to this, but if you're reasonably sure it's toast,
then you have nothing to lose...

Chris