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Recover a dead hard drive using dd
Authored by: barrysharp on Mar 15, '06 06:58:32PM

NB. The dd command is very very slow. For example on my PowerMac with 4.5 GB RAM it ran at about 8 MB/s to my 3x RAID 0 and so for dd-ing my 300GB boot device it would take some 12 hrs to complete.

Also, you can use kill -s SIGINFO dd_pid to get dd to spit out its progress. This could be useful for the long running dd process.

I suspect dd could be useful in other ways such as reporting areas on the disk with unrecoverable read errors.

BTW - Thanks for posting this hint.

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Regards... Barry Sharp



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Recover a dead hard drive using dd
Authored by: barrysharp on Mar 16, '06 06:45:30PM

BTW - what makes the dd bs=512 so slow is the block size (bs) od 512. Increase it to 51200 and speed will dramatically increase.

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Regards... Barry Sharp



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