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Use dd For Everything

 This handy HOWTO for the dd command is usually found at http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/How_To_Do_Eveything_With_DD, but is currently unavailable.  It's very hand, so here's a link from the Internet Archive.

A great use of dd is to rescue and old floppy disk or a CD.


Normally, writing null to the first two sectors of a floppy renders the floppy totally unusable. It cannot even be formatted after that. Thanks to the image of the new, unused floppy, floppy.image, you can write the first two sectors back properly.

Rescue an unreadable floppy.

ddrescue if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/sam/rescue.image bs=1440k conv=notrunc,noerror

with a new floppy in the drive

dd if=/home/sam/rescue.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 skip=2 seek=2 conv=notrunc,noerror

Now the new floppy should be readable

This method works similarly well with damaged CD's and DVD's. However, you must mount the resulting .iso image as a loop device and copy all the data that way.

RESOURCES

Other versions of dd:


Ddrutility - tools designed to work with ddrescue to aid with data recovery.

DoD version of dd called dcfldd, has a progress bar



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