New HP dv6 laptop and Knoppix (recovering data from damaged drive)

[Michael ODonnell]

> I ended up pulling out a SATA USB 3.5 hard drive enclosure,
> booting Knoppix 6.01.  Several 'fdisk -l' and 'dd if=/dev/baddisk
> of=/dev/gooddisk' I was able to copy partition information, a
> working boot sector, and the HP recovery partition.  The first whole
> disk copy was not successful as it stopped on the bad OS sector,
> a second attempt to copy the 2nd largest recovery sector worked.

Note that dd_rescue (rather than plain old dd) will atempt to continue the
copy operation even when it encounters bad sectors, writing nulls to the
destination in place of the missing data, thereby often enabling recovery
of your data from those regions of the resultant image corresponding to
the undamaged parts of the original.