[plug] Data recovery with Gentoo system rescue cd

[caston at arach.net.au]

Hello,

I have here a 80gb ide Seagate 11a (I think) drive that fails the Seagate 
SMART check. The drive was the one from my main system and I tried booting up 
this afternoon to see the tune2fs/fsck was not liking it which alerted me to 
the problem. Of course I hadn't backed up my home parition in about 6 weeks! 

I'm sure sure if there is an issue with these drives but I was using a 
hardcano 11 and felt that the drive temp was usually above what it should be. 
I watched it climb to 35degrees at the installfest.

I've now just put the drive in another machine and copying the contents to an 
identical drive that I bought from soon after finding the problem.
I'm using the gentoo systemlive cd and cp -r to do it.
I will probably then copy that again to a SATA drive on another machine once I 
have set it up again with Mandrake 10.

A few questions:

Would it be worth using dd to dump the entire drive contents to the new drive 
or should I rebuild from scatch? 

What is the dd command and block size I should use?

thanks,

Chris Caston