How to Clone a Hard Drive With Bad Sectors Using ddrescue

[Finnegander]

I have run into an issue using this tutorial.

I am attempting make an exact clone of an old 512GB HDD to a new 1TB HDD. Working thru this guide, I ran the following command: “ sudo ddrescue -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb ‘/home/ubuntu/Desktop/Disk Repair Logs/log1.log’ “. Everything seemed to be working; it rescued all 500GB over 6 days with only 8kB lost, and then the program finished. However, now when I open the new hard drive it is entirely empty save for two files, “Recovery” and “System Volume Information”, totaling no more than 140MB.

Have I missed something? Where is all the rescued data? What are these two files? I am not looking to create an image, nor am I trying to copy just a partition. I wish to make a byte-for-byte clone of the original drive.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Jared]

Are you sure you had the /sda and /sdb correct and didn't clone the wrong direction?

 

[Finnegander]

Are you sure you had the /sda and /sdb correct and didn't clone the wrong direction?

Yep. I triple checked before I started the whole process. The original drive still has all its files, and the new drive, which was previously empty, now has just those two files I mentioned. Those files appear to be text docs, but I can't really tell since they won't open.

Is there a way to verify whether the ddrescue is indeed writing to a specified drive? For example, could a person run the program, let it "rescue" a certain amount of data, then interrupt the program and check if the specified drive has been filled with the same amount?

 

[Jared]

Ddrescue will generally stop if it has an issue reading or writing the data. So if it ran for six days I'm sure it was doing something. Perhaps try scanning that destination drive with some data recovery software such as R-Studio or Recovery Explorer and see what it finds. Maybe the MFT is just corrupted.

 

[njmiano]

Just registered to say thanks for the write up. I have used a variety of data recovery tools, but never ddrescue, and your guide explained what it was doing and what the options mean in a very clear and concise way. Thanks for making the internet a better place.

 

[stevenstepp]

Thank you for your time, its very helpful for me.

 

[Rajat16]

Thank you Jared.

 

[sean.fitzpatrick]

Thank you, Jared!!!

 

[maschine_brennt]

Hi to all.

I should retrieve all data from a bootable hard disk with two windows partitions (WinXP era), where the bootable one (c:\) is no longer recognized.

So I would like to recovery (to image) the entire hard disk's content (including the two partitions and partition table): what would it be better to do?

Is this command line ok (first pass)?

sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb/hdimage /media/transcend_usb/mapfile

Second pass:

sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb/hdimage /media/transcend_usb/mapfile

In case everything goes well, will R-Studio be able to recover partitions and files (from mounted hdimage)?


Btw, some people told me that safecopy tool is slightly better than ddrescue in data recovery: is it true?


Many thanks

 

[Jared]

If you are trying to image to a file your command would be more like

sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /mnt/mountpoint/folder/image.bin [log path]...

You can't use /dev/sdb if you are imaging to a file, that would be if you wanted to image a whole disk to another disk entirely.

/dev is only used for block access. If you are creating a file you have to use the mount point.

[post]18069[/post] Btw, some people told me that safecopy tool is slightly better than ddrescue in data recovery: is it true?

Haven't played with safecopy in quite a while. Honestly, right now hddsuperclone is probably the best at handling unstable drives. But, ddrescue is just fine.