[ale] Fwd: Hard Drive Death Spiral -- AKA Recovery Software?

[householdwords at gmail.com (H P Ladds)]

2008/12/11 Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com>:
> On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 13:53 -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:
>> The first thing you need / want to do is make a full copy (image) of the drive.
>
>> So, buy a drive that is atleast 20% bigger.  (just to be sure).
>
>> Format it ext2 or some other basic FS.  (Definitely not FAT).
>
>> If the drive is more or less functional use dd to make the image.  If
>> not, look into dd_rescue (or ddrescue, I forget).
>

>        I did a presentation last year for ALE on extreme practical data
> recovery.  The presentation is here (four formats):
>
> http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/2007/DataRecovery-ALE-2007/
> http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/2007/DataRecovery-ALE-2007/DataRecovery-ALE-2007.odp
> http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/2007/DataRecovery-ALE-2007/DataRecovery-ALE-2007.ppt
>

I was there, and it was very informative. Ever since, I've had a hard
drive in the freezer w/ some desiccant. But before giving it the deep
freeze, I gave it a couple of flat spins as you suggested in your
presentation.

Thanks for posting the links as my notes from the meeting are not
available, and thanks for responding.