Re: [Bug-ddrescue] How to restore just a single partition of a multi-partition image file?

[Shahrukh Merchant]

Thanks to all who responded: Robert Trevellyan, Robert Backhaus, Timothy 
Beryl Grahek, Joe Kickman (forwarded by Antonio Diaz Diaz with minor 
correction by Scott Dwyer)! Hope I didn't leave anyone out.

Sorry for the delay in my acknowledgement, but my computer (and hence 
email) was out for about 2 days while I was doing and then cleaning up 
the restore (successfully!) so I was in "mode=RO" with email on my 
phone. :-)

The solutions fell into one of two categories:
(1) Use Unix utilities to determine the starting position and size of 
the partition you want to copy and use one of ddrescue's methods for 
limiting the copy domain to the desired portion.
(2) Attach the image file as a device node (loop device) and then it 
looks like an actual device to the OS and hence to ddrescue, and you can 
then recover the partition in question by specifying it directly as the 
input parameter to ddrescue.

I will post a summary of the responses (including a hitch I ran into and 
resolved), but I had a question on Timothy's response (quoted below), 
where he has a step by step description of Method (2).

My question to Timothy: Why are the mkntfs and ntfsfix commands needed 
or included in your flow? The partition I'm moving happens to be NTFS, 
but it seems the tools in question are all working at the partition 
level and should not care about the filesystem contained within it, 
n'est-ce pas?

Shahrukh

On 2019-01-22 12:02 PM, Timothy Beryl Grahek wrote:
> Hi Shahrukh,
>
> Allow me to please ask for some clarification.
>
> Fulldrive.img contains the C partition that you want?
>
> If that is the case, what I would personally do is use a boot disk (e.g.
> Arch; Ubuntu) and follow this procedure:
>
> 1. lsblk to find out what your 2 TB drive is.
> 2. Check to see if ddrescue is installed; if not, install it.
> 3. losetup -Pf fulldrive.img
> 4. Check the sizes of loop0 and sda using parted with the print command,
> then use resizepart 1 <insert size> for sda to match the size of the C
> partition on fulldrive.img which is represented by loop0. Please note that
> the units must match and the resize amount is the size of the partition
> plus the starting position it is at on the disk.
> 4. mkntfs -f /dev/sda1
> 5. Since sda1 is now the same size as the C partition on fulldrive.img,
> loop0p1 (assuming this is the C partition of fulldrive.img) should be able
> to be simply copied to sda1 using ddrescue now with this:
> ddrescue -f /dev/loop0p1 /dev/sda1 map1
> 6. ntfsfix /dev/sda1 after copy operation is done.
> 7. losetup -D to remove fulldrive.img loop device.
>
> Please let me know what you think and please let me know if you have any
> questions or need clarification.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Timothy Beryl Grahek
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