[X4U] Comparing disks, recovering data

[Wayne Clodfelter]

Zane H. Healy wrote:
> While my dual boot utility disk project has been going well this weekend, I
> discovered an extremely serious problem.  My 750GB Data HD is corrupt to the
> point that not even DiskWarrior can repair it.
> 
> I went out Saturday and invested in a brand new 1TB HD and a Firewire
> enclosure.  The 1TB HD now sits in the G5.  The good news is I had cloned
> the 750GB disk on September 8th, so the problem is less than a month old.  I
> have the cloned disk, as well as an older clone (I believe over a month
> old).  The bad news is there has been a lot of thrashing going on with the
> disk (it only has about 1GB free space), and I've put a lot of digital
> photo's on it in the last month (while moving what data I could to the boot
> drive).  As near as I can tell I was able to copy most files over to the new
> 1TB drive, BUT I appear to be missing about 5GB and several hundred files.
> 
> Are there any tools besides 'find . -print' and 'diff' that I can use to
> compare the three HD's (month old 750GB clone, corrupt 750GB, and new 1TB)? 
> I want to try to identify what files are missing from the 1TB HD.  
> 
> I right now have TechTool Pro trying to recover files, but it looks as if
> that will take about another day and a half to run.  Regretably I had never
> bothered to install TechTool Pro, and didn't have it protecting the drives. 
> Even worse, I've not been backing up my photo archive like I should as due
> to some other issues my NAS is in storage.
> 
> Zane
> 
> 
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Zane,

I had a 500GB Seagate drive in a FW enclosure develop some bad blocks 
and DiskWarrior could not rebuild the directory due to disk damage, but 
it did mount it's representation of the damaged drive, and from that, I 
was able to drag and drop hundreds of files, several at at a time, to 
copy them to another disk.

It was slow. It was laborious. But it worked, and I didn't have to 
rename any of the files like I would have to have done using a file 
scavenging routine such as TTP or Data Backup.

It was not a feature of DW that I even knew existed before, but in that 
instance, it was the most important feature in DW I have ever used.

Of course, ymmv depending on the degree of disk damage. Good luck.

-- 
Regards,

Wayne Clodfelter
<wayneclodfelter at mindspring.com>