Using ddrescue to recover hard drive - Don't know if image is being created
I'm an Ubuntu newbie that has tinkered around with it just a tiny bit, but ultimately don't know much about it except how powerful it could be for super users! Also, if this is the wrong place to post this to, any ideas where it would be better suited? Anyway, I have a friend that needs help getting some data off a hard drive that has gone bad on him. Windows is pretty much a lost cause for this type of problem, so I went straight to Ubuntu. (Looks like Parted Magic is no longer open source?)
So I found a couple tutorials, and the one that seems to be working the best can be found here:
I've also played around with this tutorial, but didn't have as much luck with it:
Long story short, from the first tutorial, I determined that the command I should send in terminal would be as follows:
sudo ddrescue -f /dev/sdc /dev/sdb /media/ubuntu/ExtraSpace/Sailor/Sailor.logWhen I executed that command, it was the first time that I got ddrescue to start doing its thing. It has now been running for a full day, and is reporting 22% recovered! So I think I'm making progress! (Of course I'll let it run until it's done...maybe 2 or 3 more days)
My question is this though. In the folder /ExtraSpace/Sailor I see a log file. So I believe my log file was created properly. But I'm curious where the data itself (or image file) is being saved? I don't see it anywhere, but I may just not know where to look! I thought a disk image should be created from what I read in that second tutorial...but maybe I executed the command wrong? And for what it's worth, I have made sure that /dev/sdc is the bad drive, and /dev/sdb is the drive, with sufficient space, that I am trying to get data over to.
Thanks for any help you can offer!
52 Answers
Execute
add-apt-repository ppa:hamishmb/myppa
apt-get update
apt-get install ddrescue-gui -yIt might make your life easier. /dev/sdX are block devices, you tried to copy disk-to-disk.
Also try
sudo apt install testdisk
testdisk /dev/sdXAnd use the file recovery utilities in there.
If the drive you need to recover data from is dying (as indicated by increasing numbers of bad sectors) any read access will make things worse. In this case a last read with ddrescue may get you an image of the drive you can then safely use for data recovery software.
See Recover files from NTFS drive with bad sectors on how to create such an image from an affected partition.
See Mount an image created from ddrescue on how to use that image for data recovery.
In all other cases, and if the drive was healthy you can perform recovery directly from that drive. This would be much faster.
- See How do I recover my accidentally lost Windows partitions after installing Ubuntu? on a short guide on how to use data recovery software.
