hard disk failure - now what?

[Lowell Gilbert]

perryh at pluto.rain.com writes:

> Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
>> Kelly Martin <kellymartin at gmail.com> writes:
>> > I just experienced a hard drive failure on one of my
>> > FreeBSD 7.2 production servers with no backup!
> ...
>> First, try copying the entire disk, *without* mounting it.
>
> Yep.
>
>> Use dd(1) to get a copy of the whole disk.  I believe that
>> "conv=noerror" may be necessary.
>
> Much better:  use sysutils/ddrescue, which was written
> specifically to deal with this sort of situation.

Excellent suggestion.
-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/