[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive recovery using dd

[Chris Cox]

Richard Geoffrion wrote:
> 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...
> 

dd_rescue --help