[DGD] Borkout release

[Sampsa Ranta]

Shentino wrote:
> Unfortunately, my income is insufficient to afford a backup device,
> and my computer was outdated as it is.  By toast, I mean uncorrectable
> media errors, aka Bad Sectors in the Wrong Places.
> 
> Surprisingly, my computer is not CD bootable.  I don't have any
> contacts, and my home computer has no internet connection.  My
> internet access, including the sending of this email, is entirely at
> the whims of the computer lab at my college.  If I want to transfer
> any data, I have to use the friendly floppy disk.

Reviving and recovering data from old hard disks is not that hard and 
Linux can be booted via boot disk also. A friendly floppy disk can also 
be used to do the cdrom boot/bootstrap if bios doesn't do that for you.

Hard drives I've came up with work opportunistic way, if the data seems 
corrupted, they try again, if they ever get the data read, they try to 
relocate it. Sometimes I've even been able to reuse hard disk on some 
dummy project simply overwriting the data with new to get the disk back 
to life. Of course this does not always work, there might be physical 
damage involved. Some folks even suggest freezing drives within data 
recovery process, this I've not tried.

But there is always a change that the your precious data is not in the 
damaged sector and there is a way to recover it.. What is excatly your 
Wrong Place? Is every piece of code surely on damaged sector?

Usually I've just had corrupted directories, boot records, journals, 
etc, that could have be easily bypassed. Don't give up too easily.

Hard drives going dead just happen quite often in datacenters.. :)

Writing a mudlib from scratch, that's hard..

Btw. Backup portable medium like cheapest 128 megabyte USB stick costs
      some 5-8 euros? Or use your a gmail/whatever account and do
      incremental backuping with single disk to your mail account. Don't
      waste your code.

- Sampsa Ranta