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A Good Disk Gone Bad

I have an external USB drive that seemed to get a bit overheated, and dropped a couple of sectors. That was bad, since I couldn’t access it from Windows XP, and chkdisk didn’t help.

chkdisk could find the bad sectors but couldn’t repair them.

So I turned to Linux to help fix the problem.

What I Needed

First I needed to pick up another USB external drive. Did that from newegg.com (they had the best prices at the time, and free shipping).

Then I created a Knoppix live CD. I had recently read an article on this, and a couple of the guys from the office recommended it too. I suppose I could have hooked the drives to my Red Hat Linux box, but I wanted to try something new anyway.

I went to the Knoppix download page and pulled down the ISO, which I burned to CD.

From doing research on the web, I found an open source utility called TestDisk. The readme for TestDisk was most helpful, and mentioned that TestDisk, dd_rescue also came on the Knoppix Live CD. It also mentioned a faster and perhaps better implementation of a disk rescue called ddrescue, from Antonio Diaz.

I downloaded ddrescue, built it on my Linux box, and stowed it on my C: drive on my Windows box, just in case.

Getting Started

My original effort was to boot Knoppix and use the dd_rescue program that came with the Live CD. It was slow. Over a 20 hour period it had only done about half of the disk.
I needed my Windows box back for certain things, so I aborted the process.

When I came back to it several days later, I tried the ddrescue instead.

ddrescue works in two passes. On the first pass, it grabs all the good sectors.

./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

The second pass grabs the error stuff, reading the info from the rescued.log

./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

This went much faster, and since I had to be out all day, I just let it run. The next morning, it had completed, and I ran the second pass — took maybe 15 minutes.

I’m Back, Baby!

And so, after all of that, I have my stuff back on my new drive. I’ll format the old one and use it for temporary things, things that i can afford to lose if it goes flakey again…..

Knoppix — check it out.

Technorati Tags: knoppix, linux, disk resuce, live cd, pc

Here’s a novel idea….

Everyone these days is talking about “going green,” looking for ways to help the environment. Actually, it seems pretty much like a media-driven fad to me. We went through one of these periods back in the 1970s, and it didn’t last long, otherwise we wouldn’t be having another “going green” fire drill right now.

But, aside from that, with gas prices pushing $4.00 a gallon, probably nearing $5.00 a gallon by Labor Day, we all need a way to do a little something to lessen the demand for that God-Almighty icon of American life: oil.

Here’s a novel idea. If every major company in this country took a solid look and determined which of their employees could telecommute one day per week, and then (get this) actually let them do it, there’d be a lot less demand for gasoline.

Okay, that’s not going to cure the fact that Big Oil has us by the short hairs right now (with the full complicity of the government), but it will lessen some of the thirst for Jed Clampett’s “Texas Tea.”

Here’s the problem: the bozos that run these big companies, these large conglomerates, have brains about the size of a walnut. They don’t trust themselves, so they certainly are not going to trust their employees to work from home one day a week.

So, that’s pretty much where we stand — the ability to leave the car in the garage for one day out of every five kinda rests on the brain power of someone who probably couldn’t out-think your average T. Rex, never mind those 5th graders on TV.

Still, if you can, try it. It just might help!

If you do any web development at all, using Firefox, check out the new Beta 1.0 version of Firebug, a web development extension for Firefox.

The older Firebug was good — the new one is tremendously improved…..

Firebug-Web Development Evolved

Recently, I had to put an application form on a website, so that folks wanting to apply could download it, print it out and fill it in. Because PDF is almost universal these days, I did the following:

1. I scanned in the application and had the scanner software create PDF output.
2. I posted the PDF onto the website.

That all worked well until one person asked if there were any way to fill in the fields in the PDF itself, instead of having someone print it off, and fill in the fields by hand.

After some research, I came up with the following method. It works for me but, as always, your mileage may vary……

1. I scanned in the application as .tif files, one per page.
2. I opened OpenOffice Writer and used the “Insert Picture” selection to input each of the two pages.
3. Then, using the “Form Controls” toolbar, I dropped text boxes onto the application.
4. After some fiddling around, I managed to resize the text boxes to an appropriate size for each field.
5. There were several checkboxes on the original application and I used a checkbox control for these, dropping them on the application the same way.
6. I then exported the document into PDF format.

When I opened the document in Adober Reader 7, it gave me the little bar that allowed me to highlight the fields. As I attempted to type in the first field, it gave me the typical warning about not being able to save my changes. I continued on and was able to print out a decent version of the application.

I hope this is helpful to anyone in the same position.

Have been visiting digg.com a lot lately.

It’s a kind of news site where the stories that appear on the front page, closest to the top, are the ones with the best “digg” rating. They get their digg ratings from you, the reader. If you “digg” a story, you click on the “digg” icon. It registers your “digg” and turns the icon to “dugg” so you can’t “digg” it more than once.

The best part is that there are a lot of unusual and informative stories out there that end up on digg that you might not often see in your surfing travels. Folks see them, submit then, and then enough people “digg” them to get them noticed.

Granted, some of the stories I pick up on slashdot or Wired News first, but not all that many.

Today, I read about the discovery of a new cave in Venezuala that is so large, two helicopters can enter and land. The same article also mentioned the discovery of a new species of poisonous dart frog in the same area.

I also read about enough techno-geek stuff to feed the geek for the day too.

Check it out — registration is free and you’ll enjoy it.