Thursday, April 17, 2008

How to Copy Damaged Disks (CD and DVD) in PCLinuxOS

No data storage medium is permanent in true sense. Storage media get damaged in due course of time. Hard disk drives and flash drives have less chance of being damaged as the storage surface is not exposed to human contact whereas optical drives are more prone to damages. Thanks god, there are some good disk recovery tools in GNU/Linux and ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) tops their list. It is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, optical drives, etc) to another, covering data in case of read errors.

Ddrescue is not available in pclinuxos repository, but mandriva packages of ddrescue work like a charm in pclinuxos. Here are the links to download mandriva rpms of ddresce.

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/6755185/com/ddrescue-1.8-1mdv2008.1.i586.rpm.html
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/5142576/com/ddrescue-1.3-2mdv2008.0.i586.rpm.html
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/5101191/com/ddrescue-1.3-1mdv2007.1.i586.rpm.html
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/4321269/com/ddrescue-1.2-2mdv2007.0.i586.rpm.html

ddrescue man page on pclinuxos

Click on the image to read the detailed man page of ddrescue

ddrescue copying a bad disk on pclinuxos

Click on the image to see how ddrescue recovers data from bad disk

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i tried copying some old and somewhat damaged cds on pclinuxos through ddrescue. it did a great job but took very long... is there a tool that's faster than ddrescue?

manmath sahu said...

there so many other tools, but you will find them slow too. because recovering files from damaged discs are time consuming. IMO ddrescue is the best tool in linux world.

How about this