Howto copy files from a damaged hard disk with Linux

August 24, 2011

I just got a hard disk which had bad blocks to try to rescue files, but which was too big to use dd_rescue to copy the whole partition on any other hard disk I had, before extracting the files. But in this case the file system directory structure was still readable, so I was able to use following method, which maybe helps someone else.

I mounted the file system read only with following mount -r /dev/sdb1 /mnt and than I created 2 shell scripts.

First File:

#!/bin/bash
cd /mnt/damagedHD/
mkdir /mnt/dirForExtractedFiles/
find . -type d -exec mkdir /mnt/dirForExtractedFiles/{} \;
find . -type f -exec /path2secondscript/rescue_copy.sh {} \;


Second File:

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -f "/mnt/dirForExtractedFiles/$1" ]
then
dd_rescue "$1" "/mnt/dirForExtractedFiles/$1"
fi


I use 2 scripts as sometimes the hard disk runs into a problem and than stops working until it is powered down and up again. In this case I use CRTL-C to break the loop followed by commenting the first 3 commands in the first file out, and than start it again after the harddisk is mounted again. The “if”-query in the second file makes sure we won’t try files which we already have or the one which lead to the error in the first place.