Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Some guidance or advice please on migrating from 512 -> 4K drives

[Scott Dwyer]

I think copying the files from the mounted image to the new drive is 
your only option. File systems rely on the sector size to determine the 
"cluster" or "block" size.  So while directly imaging a 512 byte per 
sector drive to a 4096 byte per sector drive may copy the data byte for 
byte, the file system will not know where the files are (or where itself 
is) because of the sector size difference. If you are trying to copy a 
bootable OS, you will have to image using drives of the same sector size.

If you are not limited to command line only, you may want to consider a 
GUI copy program/utility for future cases like this. While the "cp" 
command is very functional, it is dead slow at copying multiple files. 
Many GUI utilities are more optimized for this. Even just the normal 
copy/paste function in Ubuntu should be faster than "cp", although you 
would have to test to see for sure and find the best way.

Scott

On 5/11/2013 12:59 AM, Paul L Daniels wrote:
> I've got a client drive that I'm recovering, VFAT, 2TB, 512Byte
> sectors, but the drive I'm trying to migrate it to is a 4K sector AF
> type unit; so when I did the usual;
>
>     ddrescue -v -f /dev/sdd /dev/sde migrate.log
>
> ... even though it "worked" the data on destination drive wasn't
> accessible directly.
>
> Is there anything I can do other than to first make an image of the
> failing drive, then do a slow "cp -av" from the image to the
> destination?
>
> Paul.