[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive recovery using dd

[Richard Geoffrion]

In trying to recover ANY data off of a failing hard drive, what thoughts 
and experiences can one share on the following ideas?

Performing recovery operations on this 160gig SATA drive is taking 
forever because of the constant read-retries that the drive is 
performing.  Is there a way to configure the hard drive to cut down on 
the number of retries reading a sector?


IF the source drive is a 160gig SATA I drive..and the destination drive 
is a blank 250gig SATA I drive, would using dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb  
copy everything off of /dev/sda on to /dev/sdb and then stop...leaving 
me with a 250 gig drive on which I could attempt partition recovery 
etc...et al...

-- 
Richard