I was running ddrescue from ULTIMATE BOOT CD, in my DVD drive.
I had the defective and salvage drives connected, and a floppy disk.

I suppose i should have "mounted" the floppy so it could be written to, but i clicked on the floppy icon only after the first rescue attempt.

I thought ddrescue was going to skip the bad sectors, but it got stuck. Can i issue a command to tell it to start on another location ?

Thanks for the info - that means that, using the command line you provided, then it's likely ddrescue was trying to write its logfile to the DVD, as you didn't specify a different path for the logfile. That explains why the floppy disk logfile contents seemed wrong - they were wrong.


It's not just mounting the disk (strictly speaking, the filesystem on the disk) - you also need to specify the correct path to the logfile on that mounted filesystem, on the ddrescue command line.


ddrescue can only react after the read error is reported to it, by the OS. All retries by the disk drive itself, the OS and its device drivers will still occur. The latter 2 can be controlled, typically requiring detailed OS knowledge / skill.

The internal disk retries are more difficult to control, as this requires disk-specific knowledge - this is where professional cloning equipment like DDI appear to add extra value. Your disk is likely to be doing retries (and causing the clicking that you hear), before a read failure is reported by the disk, to the OS.

So all of this has to occur, before ddrescue is even aware of a problem...! And continuing to operate in this state won't be doing the disk any good


In addition to the retries (and possible timeouts) involved in the process I mentioned above, the next block which ddrescue tries to read after one read failure, may also be unreadable and so the cycle can sometimes repeat, while making slow progress.


That's the "-i" option. Yes, you can try different starting points. That is one of many possible things which might help, but as always with DIY, you might precipitate the total failure of the disk.

Your problem with the missing logfile is that, since you're writing to a disk and not a file, you can't use the "generate logfile" option unless that target disk was zero-filled before you started (see the ddrescue manual for more about this). In short, assuming the target disk was not zero-filled before you started, I don't see a way for you to avoid re-starting the whole process, but this time with a working logfile - fix that first and test it, if you're going to continue with ddrescue. (You might want to read about "tail -f".)

Note: I'm not telling you what to do - taking the risk of DIY has to be your choice.

Cheers, Vulcan.
I'm going to give it a go later on.

I want to thank you for taking the time to explain all these things so patiently. This site is really lucky to have members like you.

You're welcome