tar -C foo -c . | tar -C bar -x ends up with nothing on read errors

[Ulf Rompe]

Am Montag, den 29.10.2007, 15:07 +0000 schrieb Marcin Owsiany:
> I was hoping to save what I can from a disk which starts to show read
> errors,

Whenever you want to introspect some possibly defective media, try to
create an image of it first. This keeps the drive activity at the
minimum, and whatever you want to do afterwards (copying, undeleting,
scanning for file signatures, etc.), you will be able to do it on the
image instead of the drive.

You can create an image with "dd conv=noerror ...", or you may install
"ddrescue" and use that, it is said to do a good job at detecting and
skipping bad blocks.

You can then mount that image read only using this command:
  mount -o loop,ro /YOUR/IMAGEFILE /mnt
and find your file system in /mnt. 

Before doing anything that could damage your image (like running fsck on
it), don't forget to make a backup copy of it.

[x] ulf 

-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.