Data Recovery Problems

[Goobley]

I know this is very similar to a recent thread on this forum but the information there won't really solve my problem, so I'm posting a new thread.

I wanted to install gentoo on my parents' old (~Feb 2003 by date codes) iMac G4 so they can use it for browsing etc. It hadn't been turned on for about 2 years and refused to boot, even from its original install disks. I decided to clone the disk and save what data I could (probably old family photos and similar on there).

Tried target disk mode and FireWire - no joy, HDD was neither readable nor repairable by any of my computers with FireWire. So I stripped the machine down and recovered the disk (Yay Ultra-ATA!). I then had to find my IDE to USB adapter as I've no computers that still have such a legacy port. Linux Mint was able to mount the drive but it drops out while attempting to copy the User directory - the drive just seems to unmount.

Ok so:
sudo cp -r -v : no go, it prepares to copy but drive seems to stop functioning first.
gddrescue: If I run with -n (only recover working sectors) it copies about 5GB to the target before failing with 3 errors (on an 80GB drive). If i run with -r3 (try 3 times to recover bad sectors) the drive unmounts on the first bad sector. It keeps spinning but is no longer mounted or available in fstab.
I've put a heatsink and fan on the drive as it gets pretty toasty but this hasn't changed anything.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'd rather not do a normal dd as:
1) I don't think it would complete it after hitting the bad sectors judging by the current precedent.
2) I hate not knowing what's going on with dd and big files.

The fact that I can browse the file system on Mint is a good thing - it's slow as hell and seems to crash when I want to copy anything from it.

Any suggestions please?
Cheers!

[kompukare]

One word:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS%2B

Or probably more relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS%2B#...rating_systems

Have to say I have never tried this, but I do know that Apple like to do things differently. Now this was ok once-upon-a-time because when HSF+ was introduced PCs were mostly FAT32, even going further back to HSF (1985) which supported ~30 char filenames and still allows characters which NTFS cannot support.

[peterb]

As kompukare referred to, Apple uses HFS+ filesystems, but (as you have discovered0 modern linux kernels support hFS+ for read and write operations.

From what you have said, it does sound as if the drive has hard errors on it. There are some HFS+ tools to repair errors in the file system, so it might be worth running fsck.hfsplus against the drive. Be warned though, that can sometimes make things worse. However if you run it in test mode, it won't actually write any changes to the disk, so at least you can see what might happen.

man fsck.hfplus

will give you more info.

dd is quite happy with large files - ideally clone to another disk, but you can clone to a file, and then mount the file as a virtual disk. dcfldd is an improved version of dd - it gives you an indication that something is happening and can give you a checksum to verify the copy, although you probably wouldn't need it. Use a large block size to speed things up a bit (4096 is a good starting point)

[Apex]

The one thing that i didn't put in the other thread is that when i had it connected via my sata to usb adapter it would cause the disk to unmount when trying to image, connected via the sata port and i was able to image the disk, It may be that the pata to usb adapter isn't helping in matters [not sure if you have tried without ?]