[mdlug] Recovering damaged EXT2

[David McMillan]

Drew wrote:
> At 08:44 AM 9/17/09, bob dion wrote:
>> David McMillan wrote:
>>
>>>     In the meantime, I tried a ddrescue on the "hit the floor" drive,
>>> and it got to 140GB before hitting an I/O error it can't seem to get past.
>> Try the ' -i ' option with a starting point passed the io error.
> 
> Also dd with conv=noerror. dd skip=$sector_number_past_error should 
> do the same thing as
> the ddrescue -i option.

	Well, it turns out the I/O error wasn't in the drive, it was apparently 
in the host computer -- it seems as if, for whatever reason, this 
computer (running Ubuntu 8 and 9) just quits after a certain amount of 
time with heavy action on any USB disks.  I switched to another Linux 
machine and got well past the point where the first computer kept failing.
	Then it turned out that I didn't have *quite* enough empty space on my 
destination drive as I thought, and apparently ddrescue can't pipe to 
bzip or gzip.  So I crossed my fingers, tried dd with a gzip pipe to the 
desination file... and got a "permissions" error.  Even though I was 
using sudo(?!?!?).  Gah.  I'll have to take another stab at it over the 
weekend.