Hi, I'm a total linux newbie but my dell laptop hard disk has failed and after reading on the net, I've come accross dd_rescue and ddrescue.
My laptop won't boot up and is making clicking noises. I download Knoppix 5.1 and booted up from that. I can see 3 partitions on the hd. P1 is dell utilites, P3 is the dell image restore and P2 is the main partition with windows and all my documents which I DO NOT have a back up of. I can access both P1 and P3 in the knoppix GUI, browse the directories, etc. P2 is not accessable though, it just hangs clicking away. I loaded up knoppix on another windows PC and tested out dd_rescue which is included with the knoppix cd, on my non-damaged other pc's hard disk. I also have a spare larger capacity HDD in a USB enclosure so it managed to copy the HD okay. I then read up a bit more and discovered that ddrescue would be better as it skips over the bad sectors instead of trying for ages. But as it's not included with knoppix I would have to mount and install it. I downloaded the file ddrescue-1.5.tar.bz2 from my other windows pc and copied it accross onto a floppy. Now, as I said I'm a total newbie. How do I mount this floppy and decompress the file to run it? So far I've launched knoppix inserted USB floppy recognised by the GUI as SDA opened up konsole typed sudo -s typed cd /media/sda typed tar xjf ddrescue-1.5.tar.bz2 and this is were I'm stuck I'm getting alot of "skipping to next header" and "cannot open: no such file or directory" messages. The commands I copied from another web page I came accross and have no ideal what xjf does, possibly the /media/sda part is wrong. I also tried /dev/floppy and /dev/fd0. Once I can get this simple task up and running I have a lot more problems ahead, as I'm waiting for a 2.5 to 3.5 hd adapter so that I can put the HD into my other pc and run it from there rather than from the laptop. The clicking makes me think it's not going to last long so I would prefer to try and get ddrescue working rather than dd_rescue. Oh and I tried spinrite but it doesn't even recognise the HD. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/HD-failure---total-linux-newbie---can%27t-launch-ddrescue--help-tf4162477.html#a11843481 Sent from the Gnu - ddrescue mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue
