HDD Recovery tricks

Due to the way IDE drivers deal with bad sectors and stuff, the following tricks might be useful raising a dead or bad drive from the dead:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda bs=512

Here is another one:

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hdb and then cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb

Doing that a few times should get the drive to re-map any bad sectors.

Cheers,
Steve