[Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue crashes system on kernel 2.6.18

[Arik Raffael Funke]

Hi,

Background: I have had a power supply unit failure and as a result the 
PCBs of three hard drives were fried as well as the processor.

I have replaced the PCB from an identical drive for the data drive, a 
WD200EB-00CSF0. The harddrive is seems to work fine for almost all 
files: It can be mounted, data is generally accessible, etc.

When I try to image the drive with ddrescue, it proceeds without errors 
within 20 minutes to 16.5Gb/20Gb where it encounters the first errors. 
It then takes approximately another 5-10 minutes apparently only getting 
errors before finally crashing the whole system.

A photograph of the screen can be seen here: (Sorry for the flash...)
http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/745/crasho.jpg

The result is the same with:
ddrescue -n
ddrescue --direct
ddrescue --raw

All attempts were made in runlevel 1 on a Centos 5.4 system with kernel 
2.8.18. Resuming recovery with the log file makes the system crash 
shortly after resuming.


Can anybody tell me how to either:
- read out a complete image (obviously without the presumably bad 
sectors) so that I can run file system recovery? The image now is truncated.

- fix the hard drive problem? (I.e. why should the hard drive have bad 
sectors in the last few GB given a mere power surge?)

Many thanks for any help!

- Arik