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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:

https://www.data-medics.com/forum/how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html

I've also played around with this tutorial, but didn't have as much luck with it:

https://www.technibble.com/guide-using-ddrescue-recover-data/

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.log

When 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!

Trevzilla
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2 Answers2

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Execute

add-apt-repository ppa:hamishmb/myppa
apt-get update
apt-get install ddrescue-gui -y

It 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/sdX

And use the file recovery utilities in there.

zx485
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Peter
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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.

In all other cases, and if the drive was healthy you can perform recovery directly from that drive. This would be much faster.

Takkat
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