Monday, September 13, 2010

Disk drives fails on certain sectors

I received a disk drive today that often worked, but when it hit a few sectors it would fail, so the the only way forward was a power reset. My normal approach would be to do an incremental image, and restart after every failure. This disk was 1TB so an incremental image would take several hours which I did not have. By doing a partial image of the directory area, I couild determine that the required data, from a single subdirectory was stored over the complete disk.

My approach to save time was to do a selective restore of the required directory but at the same time, when a failed sector was found, change the program so that it would be skipped. The hope was that the requested data would not hit too many failed sectors, each requiring a program change and recover restart.

It will actually be a very useful feature to add to the software so that a hardware reset could be done, and recovery then continue.

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