[aklug] Re: Wife's hard drive is failing

On Sun, November 18, 2012 6:44 pm, Leif Sawyer wrote:
> Use dd to grab the first meg or so of the drive, and put the resulting file on
> a usb key or different drive, so your not exercising the failed drive during
> the next process.
>
> Use dd on the extracted file to search for a partition table, using seek to
> skip ahead in the file 1 byte at a time until you find the correct offset.
>
> Then you can dd the failing drive into a new drive, skipping ahead that
> offset, so that the partition table is written correctly on the new drive.
>
> I've done this with a couple of failed raid'd drives, and it has worked for
> me.

There is a utility called binwalk:
https://code.google.com/p/binwalk/

that will do the stepping-through for you, so you don't have to
manually increment the seek. I haven't used it personally, but
it's a great idea.

--
Bryan Medsker
bryanm@acsalaska.net
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