I recently had a hard drive begin to develop bad sectors. Fortunately, it was still under warranty, and the drive's replacement was shipped to me before I had to ship the dying drive back. I decided that ddrescue was my best bet to pull the data off of the old drive and write it to the new one.
There were three partitions on the old drive, but there was only one that had data that I cared about, so I decided not to mess with the other two. I partitioned (MBR) the new drive into two partitions, with one partition big enough to handle all of the original partition's data. I then used ddrescue to write from the old drive's NTFS data partition to the new drive's data partition (something along the lines of ddrescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 ddrescue.log). Regardless of the number of retries on the specific block(s), there was one block that failed due to bad sectors. After the rescue, I can mount the partition in Linux and there aren't any files that I've run into that have any issues. It's a different story for Windows (7), however. Windows can see the physical drive, but doesn't recognize it as being formatted or having a filesystem on it... so obviously, I can't access anything on the drive. In Windows' drive manager, it shows the two partitions (rather one partition and some unpartitioned space), and sees the primary partition as "Healthy" with a RAW filesystem. Is there something that I'm missing here? How can I get Windows to recognize the NTFS filesystem in that partition? Thanks in advance for any advice. Matt /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
