xref: /freebsd/sbin/recoverdisk/recoverdisk.1 (revision aa0a1e58)
1.\" Copyright (c) 2006 Ulrich Spoerlein <uspoerlein@gmail.com>
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25.\" $FreeBSD$
26.\"
27.Dd May 6, 2006
28.Dt RECOVERDISK 1
29.Os
30.Sh NAME
31.Nm recoverdisk
32.Nd recover data from hard disk or optical media
33.Sh SYNOPSIS
34.Nm
35.Op Fl b Ar bigsize
36.Op Fl r Ar rlist
37.Op Fl s Ar snapshot
38.Op Fl w Ar wlist
39.Ar special
40.Op Ar file
41.Sh DESCRIPTION
42The
43.Nm
44utility reads data from the
45.Ar special
46file until all blocks could be successfully read.
47It starts reading in multiples of the sector size.
48Whenever a block fails, it is put to the end of the working queue and will be
49read again, possibly with a smaller read size.
50.Pp
51By default it uses block sizes of roughly 1 MB, 32kB, and the native
52sector size (usually 512 bytes).
53These figures are adjusted slightly, for devices whose sectorsize is not a
54power of 2, e.g., audio CDs with a sector size of 2352 bytes.
55.Pp
56The options are as follows:
57.Bl -tag -width indent
58.It Fl b Ar bigsize
59The size of reads attempted first.
60The middle pass is roughly the logarithmic average of the bigsize and
61the sectorsize.
62.It Fl r Ar rlist
63Read the list of blocks and block sizes to read from the specified file.
64.It Fl s Ar snapshot
65How often we should update the worklist file while things go OK.
66The default is 60 and the units is "progress messages" so if things
67go well, this is the same as once per minute.
68.It Fl w Ar wlist
69Write the list of remaining blocks to read to the specified file if
70.Nm
71is aborted via
72.Dv SIGINT .
73.El
74.Pp
75The
76.Fl r
77and
78.Fl w
79options can be specified together.
80Especially, they can point to the same file, which will be updated on abort.
81.Sh OUTPUT
82The
83.Nm
84utility
85prints several columns, detailing the progress
86.Bl -tag -width remaining
87.It Va start
88Starting offset of the current block.
89.It Va size
90Read size of the current block.
91.It Va len
92Length of the current block.
93.It Va state
94Is increased for every failed read.
95.It Va done
96Number of bytes already read.
97.It Va remaining
98Number of bytes remaining.
99.It Va "% done"
100Percent complete.
101.El
102.Sh EXAMPLES
103.Bd -literal
104# recover data from failing hard drive ad3
105touch /data/lots_of_space
106recoverdisk /dev/ad3 /data/lots_of_space
107
108# clone a hard disk
109recoverdisk /dev/ad3 /dev/ad4
110
111# read an ISO image from a CD-ROM
112touch /data/cd.iso; recoverdisk /dev/acd0 /data/cd.iso
113
114# continue reading from a broken CD and update the existing worklist
115recoverdisk -r worklist -w worklist /dev/acd0 /data/cd.iso
116
117# recover a single file from the unreadable media
118touch file.avi; recoverdisk /cdrom/file.avi file.avi
119
120# If the disk hangs the system on read-errors try:
121recoverdisk -b 0 /dev/ad3 /somewhere
122
123.Ed
124.Sh SEE ALSO
125.Xr dd 1
126.Sh HISTORY
127The
128.Nm
129utility first appeared in
130.Fx 7.0 .
131.Sh AUTHORS
132.An -nosplit
133The original implementation was done by
134.An Poul-Henning Kamp Aq phk@FreeBSD.org
135with minor improvements from
136.An Ulrich Sp\(:orlein Aq uspoerlein@gmail.com .
137.Pp
138This manual page was written by
139.An Ulrich Sp\(:orlein .
140.Sh BUGS
141Reading from media where the sectorsize is not a power of 2 will make all
1421 MB reads fail.
143This is due to the DMA reads being split up into blocks of at most 128kB.
144These reads then fail if the sectorsize is not a divisor of 128kB.
145When reading a full raw audio CD, this leads to roughly 700 error messages
146flying by.
147This is harmless.
148