Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Help rescuing my 500GB disk

[Scott D]

I am at work so I must be brief. I see you are using my very new utility ddru_ntfsbitmap. I hope it works well for you. What I do see in your commands is that after a failure, you leave out "-m /tmp/domain_logfile". Leaving that out will cause ddrescue to read the whole partition and not just the used part. So your command after a failure should be more like "ddrescue -A "-m /tmp/domain_logfile -v /dev/sdb1 /tmp/Image.img /tmp/Image.log", unless you do wish to recover the whole partition and not just the used part.

 

As for mounting, I personally would not try to mount it until the recovery is finished. And if it were me, if possible I would make a backup copy of the recovery before attempting any "fixing" or mounting, especially if there are errors.

On Monday, November 11, 2013 9:11 AM, Andrej Trobentar <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello all,

I have a 2,5" Hitachi 500GB disk connected to a USB-to-SATA converter
(/dev/sdb1) with a NTFS filesystem on it that is failing and want to
recover as much data as possible using ddrescue. During the recovery I'm
also cooling the disk as much as possible.

Since I'm fairly new to data recovery I would first like to check with
you guys, so I don't throw a couple of days away by experimenting :)

Here's what I did so far :

1) Because I know it is a NTFS partition and want to recover only the
used portion of the partition I ran :
"ddru_ntfsbitmap /dev/sdb1 /tmp/domain_logfile"


2) Then I run ddrescue with the following parameters to create a disk
image :
"ddrescue -m /tmp/domain_logfile -v /dev/sdb1 /tmp/Image.img /tmp/Image.log"


Now, if my disk stops working (is unresponsive) I'll just power cycle
the USB-to-SATA converter to get it working and then run :
"ddrescue -A -v /dev/sdb1 /tmp/Image.img /tmp/Image.log"


When the ddrescue completes, I'll just run :
- "fsck.ntfs /tmp/Image.img"
- "mount -o loop /tmp/Image.img /mnt/Image"
and copy the data from /mnt/Image to a safe place



That's my theory :) Now to my questions :
- is my way of thinking right here?
- if I cancel the ddrescue process with CTRL+C (or there is a power
failure) should the image file created so far be mountable or must I
wait for ddrescue to finish?
- what if power cycling the converter doesn't start up the disk at one
point and I get an "unfinished" image - can I still recover something?


Many thanks for your help,

    Andrej.

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