imaging using ddrescue ,not going well ?

[raven4d]

hello all ,

i have this external USB3 hdd western digital , that was suffering from a little bad blocks , and it was successfully imaged and recovered.

the customer left it to me , so i was experiencing imaging it with ddrescue as i may use it to image slightly damaged drives "in case my ddi4 was busy" using :

ddrescue -f -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb
where hda is the sick drive and hdb is the destination drive "wiped"

the upper command should image the whole drive , but when trying r-studio , it just shows nothig .


any ideas ?

[lcoughey]

i have this external USB3 hdd western digital , that was suffering from a little bad blocks , and it was successfully imaged and recovered.

If it was successfully recovered, why is there a problem?

the customer left it to me , so i was experiencing imaging it with ddrescue as i may use it to image slightly damaged drives "in case my ddi4 was busy" using :

ddrescue -f -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb
where hda is the sick drive and hdb is the destination drive "wiped"

the upper command should image the whole drive , but when trying r-studio , it just shows nothig .

any ideas ?

Drive was password protected and not properly mounted? You didn't image the right drive?

[raven4d]

dear ;

thank you for your precious reply .

i am just getting familiar with ddrescue in case i had traffic on my ddi , i am doing so for testing purposes only .

no the drive is not password protected as no such thing faced me when imaging using ddi

[Vulcan]

the upper command should image the whole drive

That's not necessarily true. The result depends on many factors, and since you are new to using ddrescue, then we cannot know whether even the basics are correct.

I'm not going to try to teach you how to use ddrescue remotely, but here are some questions/comments for you to think about:

a) What did ddrescue show on the screen at the end of your attempted cloning?
b) Did the cloning take a sensible amount of time for the drive capacity?
c) Compare clone source & target using a hex editor to see whether the clone started.
d) Always use a logfile when using ddrescue - it provides info for later review about which parts of the drive were readable & which were unreadable, as well as allowing cloning to be stopped & restarted, without repeating already successfully cloned parts.
e) That ddrescue command line that you used may not be optimal for many different reasons. In my experience, it is common to need to use some different variations of ddrescue command options, to improve the success rate. In addition, I always use the verbose option.
f) Check the OS messages (e.g. output of dmesg on Linux) to look for any error messages at the time you were cloning.

but when trying r-studio , it just shows nothig .

It's too unclear/ambiguous what you mean exactly - not enough detail.

[lcoughey]

oh...experiencing = experimenting. Now I get it.

ddrescue -f /source /destination logfile

You definitely want the logfile so that you don't have to keep starting all over again if you have to restart the command.

Personally, I only use ddrescue as an alternative to DDI on drives that are not readable by DDI (ie, SCSI, SAS, CD, etc). It isn't worth risking the client's data and they can wait if I don't have a DDI system available.

[w.simon]

hello all ,

i have this external USB3 hdd western digital , that was suffering from a little bad blocks , and it was successfully imaged and recovered.

the customer left it to me , so i was experiencing imaging it with ddrescue as i may use it to image slightly damaged drives "in case my ddi4 was busy" using :

ddrescue -f -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb
where hda is the sick drive and hdb is the destination drive "wiped"

the upper command should image the whole drive , but when trying r-studio , it just shows nothig .


any ideas ?

Hello

hda is the first ide harddrive (Most of the time we boot on it)
hdb is the second ide harddrive

I hope hdb were not the harddrive you wanted to image, your just have clone it with the boot drive ....

[mr_spokk]

First thing I'll think of when I see you have a external WD is encryption.
What model is it?

[raven4d]

hello all ,

i have this external USB3 hdd western digital , that was suffering from a little bad blocks , and it was successfully imaged and recovered.

the customer left it to me , so i was experiencing imaging it with ddrescue as i may use it to image slightly damaged drives "in case my ddi4 was busy" using :

ddrescue -f -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb
where hda is the sick drive and hdb is the destination drive "wiped"

the upper command should image the whole drive , but when trying r-studio , it just shows nothig .


any ideas ?

Hello

hda is the first ide harddrive (Most of the time we boot on it)
hdb is the second ide harddrive

I hope hdb were not the harddrive you wanted to image, your just have clone it with the boot drive ....

nop , i boot using a flash disk and i am familiar with linux enviroment . thanks for the notice .
the drive are semi-dead and for that i think ddrescue couldn't retreive any data .

i tried with another drive and all went well .

thank you lcoughey,Vulcan, w.simon and mr_spokk for your help .