While at work today I came up against a booting (to a fashion) Windows XP laptop that had the symptoms of a failing hard disk. Lots of disk errors in the log etc.. My first thought was to backup the data but unfortunately due to disk corruption some of the files wouldn’t copy across. We tried to use CloneZilla with the rescue option enabled to clone the data but even this failed with many read errors. Steve Courtney suggested using DDRescue from a live CD to see if it could copy the data to a new disk.

I downloaded the latest version of the Ubuntu Rescue Remix cd from here: http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/Using the steps below (original post: http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/90#comment-186) I was able to recover the data back to a new disk.

If needing to make a dd image the same steps can be used here: Guide to creating dd images

1) Boot the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD and wait for the command prompt
2) Use the command sudo lshw -C disk -short to work out which drive is the source drive and which is the destination.

3) Use the command sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/[sourcedisk (sda etc)] /dev/[desternationdisk (sdb etc)] log to clone the source disk to the destination disk.

4) Keep your fingers crossed the corruption isn’t to bad!

5) If the machine boots and is a windows machine, I would recommend loading a command prompt and typing the command sfc /scannow to check that the important windows files are intact.