[plug] CD/DVD recovery and rant on WD Drives

[Brad Campbell]

Andrew Furey wrote:

> 
> Not particularly wanting to rain on your parade, but
> wouldn't dd_rescue do a fair bit of the above? I've
> used it several times on hard disks, worked quite
> well.

Close.. if dd_rescue hits read errors it skips them and keeps going (according to the web page 
anyway). Doing it my way just keeps on plugging away from different angles until it gets a good read.

Its one of those cases where it was 12:30am and I figured I knew how to read the disk, so I knocked 
a bash script up to do it for me while I slept.

It looks like dd_rhelp may do what I want really, but hey I already have it working. (Well it would 
still be working if I had not trashed my second WD2000JB drive in 2 weeks.

I have 2 WD2000's in a Raid-0 as my nfsroot for another machine and high speed scratch for video 
processing, this is the second one to die in as many weeks. Worse still, I purchased them in AUS 
before I left and WD will not RMA a drive in the Middle East. I have to go and argue with the WD 
agent who is not interested coz I'm not going to buy 200 drives from him.
PAH. Last WD drives I buy.

They have 2x80mm fans behind them and 2x92mm fans in front of them. They run cool and have been 
treated well. These were the same drives that had that bloody firmware bug causing them to drop out 
of raid arrays.

Run a SMART check on it and it simply runs around in circles screaming "Fire! Fire!". Disk is toast :p(

More Maxtors for this bunny. (which is odd in itself as 2 years ago I would not have even sniffed in 
their general direction)

Brad