Program to copy data from a bad disk?

[sat at cenkes.org]

> Maxim Sobolev wrote:
>> LI Xin wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Recently my hard drive goes bad again, which has a lot of bad sectors
>>> for unknown reasons.  I am looking for some software that is capable
>>> of doing a sector-to-sector copy of the hard drive.
>>>
>>> I have tried dd but with conv=noerror,sync it would just fill 0's for
>>> the whole block size (say, in order to get best speed you will want
>>> bs=128k or even larger, but that means that you will lose data  when 1
>>> of these 256 sectors is bad).  Is there any program that is smarter
>>> which do a sector-to-sector copy for these failed blocks and use
>>> larger transfer buffer for others?
>>
>> The src/tools/tools/recoverdisk does exactly that.
>
> Ah, great, and especially it's available from LiveFS disc as
> /usr/sbin/recoverdisk!

If you don't quite like the result, ddrescue (not dd_rescue) is
very well-maintained (upstream), and is very fast and smart in
comparison to its alternatives.

Another good chance to save your data is sadly commercial -
SpinRite ($89).