How to Clone a Hard Drive With Bad Sectors Using ddrescue

E

erik.teichmann

New member
So I've got a 3tb drive that's failing. I've got a new 4tb drive arriving today.

Help me walk through my steps here:
1) Go through the tutorial as described
2) I'll be cloning to the new drive.
3) Disconnect old HDD, attempt to boot with new HDD (it's not the boot drive, documents and media)

Now, here's where it gets interesting. I have two partial cloud backups that I can work from. Should I first try to repair with R-Studio (or whatever) and then copy my backups on top? Or copy the backups over first, then see if anything is left that needs repairing?
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
When you clone a drive using ddrescue it's a block level copy, not file level. So anything you have on there will get nuked by the new image.

As to what to do with your clone afterward, that largely depends on how good of a clone you get. If it's around 99.9% or better read, there's a good chance it'll just mount when connected to a Windows computer and you'll be able to just copy data. If it's a lot of bad sectors, you'll likely need to use data recovery software, such as R-Studio to analyze the clone drive and reconstruct the file system so you can extract the files. But, you need to recover them out to a third drive. Data recovery software won't modify the drive it's working from, that'd lead to disaster if it did.

To do data recovery properly, you need two additional drives beyond the original. You need one to create the image of the data and then you need another to copy the files to. Any attempt to circumvent this will only lead to problems later on.
 
H

hulk17

New member
I used a WD 1TD ext. HD to back up my internal HD and somehow BOTH have crashed and failed within the past few months.

I am trying to recover the files somehow.

I tried using DDRescue via ubuntu but when I go to select the image source and the image destination my ext. HD (the damaged one) and the new one (transfer to this one) do not appear.

How on earth can I try to save my dead HD??
 
H

hulk17

New member
No idea...SMART errors..the internal used to make taht ticking noise, i guess it finally gave out after months of not using it.
 
pclab

pclab

Moderator
Maybe the external one can have the slow problem. HDDSuperclone might help on that.

But it should be checked by proper tools first. You risk to loose your data (or make it much more difficult to recover...)
 
V

viking

New member
pclab":1zre02mx said:
I don't know if Knoppix have that option, but other distros have: why don't you use a LIVE DVD to boot?
It has all the configurations done for boot and work from the DVD.
Click to expand...
I am able to use a DVD but I am then not running in Live mode and it is very slow to boot.
Anyway, it turned out that my USB stick was bad. I got a new one and used the Linux Live USB Creator to create a bootable USB. I then didnt have the strange GRUB prompt!

However, I now have a new issue. Not sure if you have any idea why the KNOPPIX-Data fails to mount (so Live Mode doesn't work):
KNOPPIX-failed_mount.png
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
I think that message in red is the problem: [glow=red]partition is too small[/glow]

Perhaps you used too small a thumbdrive for it to run?
 
V

viking

New member
Jared":3bytk5hb said:
I think that message in red is the problem: [glow=red]partition is too small[/glow]

Perhaps you used too small a thumbdrive for it to run?
Click to expand...
256 GB (226 GB free)...
I think that I got the message in red because /dev/sda3 first failed to mount.
Thus, the question is why it failed or how I can troubleshoot it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top