Thanks Jason. Yea, the recovery is the most important thing at this point. This is my primary computer, so it would be nice to be up and running quickly... but from what I've learned in the last few days, this isn't a quick process and if i want my data back, I'll have to wait. I guess I was more concerned with the failing drive getting worse as the process goes along... working so hard on rescuing the errors while good data sits there waiting to be copied. I'm afraid the drive will kick the bucket before it gets to the good data. My experience here is thin, so I'm not sure if this is a legitimate worry or not. If it's the write-heads that are the culprit, then I suppose I shouldn't worry about it as ddrescue is simply reading from the drive, right? My drive isn't "clicking" as I've heard it described elsewhere, but the drive has always been a little noisy when seeking and doing the nightly maintenance (i.e. virus scans, defrag, etc....) so I'm not really sure what went wrong. Incidentally, I purchased a new HD a few weeks ago to replace this drive because the noise was annoying for guests that were sleeping in my computer room. Of course, before I had a chance to swap drives, this one failed... ugh. Anyway, I will use this time to study up a little more on HDs and they way they store data... it's very interesting. When all of this is done, I plan to install two Seagate SATA drives with RAID 0 (data striping) and look to establish a regular backup routine so I won't have to go through this again. I'm considering several options... from setting up an external drive (perhaps one that supports network access, so I can also backup my laptop and kids' computer) to subscribing to one of the many "online" backup services. Any suggestions or experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again. - Matt
----- Original Message ---- From: "DePriest, Jason R." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Matt Boge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: Ariel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; bug-ddrescue@gnu.org Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2007 11:04:40 AM Subject: Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue 1.3 - questions from a newbie On 1/9/07, Matt Boge wrote: > Yikes... I guess I spoke too soon. 12 hours ago I was encouraged by the > speed pickup (ipos:38152 MiB), but now we have slowed to a crawl (ipos: 39548 > MiB). > I had a 20 GB drive go bad on me and it took about 72 hours to get a full image. It didn't even have that many bad places, but it was unbootable and unmountable (as a readable filesystem). So, don't worry too much about the time if you time is all you have. I had this drive sitting around for over two years before I was able to recover anything from it. _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list Bug-ddrescue@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue