Hi All,

A total noob here. So my hard drive crashed, and I wanted to make an image from it. I used ddrescue for this job. At first it went well but after a while we had a power outage forcing me to turn off my PC.

When I decided to resume the recovery, ddrescue won't start anymore. I can see the drive unmounted but ddrescue just won't run.

I tried doing the cloning in a different distro of linux but still no success. I'm feeling like linux is doing something on the drive that ddrescue can't have access on it.

Question: Is there a command that I can run before I run ddrescue to free up or kill any and all processes that is accessing the drive?

As an addedd info, the drive is now raw and is currently attached to a USB3 enclosure.

Your help will be very much appreciated. Please. Thanks.

In addition to ddrescue not getting access, even gparted or any other apps can't access the usb drive although i can see the raw drive displayed in Disks app and shown as not mounted. Thus, I think the problem lies on an app trying to access the usb drive which in effect blocks any other apps access to it.

Please, I really need help on this one. Thanks.

hi jake,

bit thin on detail there dude...

just to start by saying the fewer translations between a source drive and system the better.
For instance always use native cables if possible, ie sata drive connect via sata, not USB enclosure.

"my drive crashed" ...symptoms?

"I _*used*_ ddrescue" ... what did you type explicitly? ie ddrescue [options] infile outfile [mapfile/log]

"we had a power outage forcing me to turn off my PC."
The power outage turned off your PC or you had a UPS running from which you made a graceful shutdown manually?

What other commands, if any, did you issue to interact with the drive?
How are you identifying which drives are where? ... /dev/sdX (source drive / destination drive)

"ddrescue wont start anymore" .... like what? you type in ddrescue [...] and it does what... nothing at all? just no output or ..?
are you using a mapfile?

Which drives were / were not mounted at all when you started?
ie
I'm using the 320GB source drive and it's on /dev/sdX with a 500GB destination on /dev/sdY and attempting a full disk to disk copy (and so on).


-------

as ever, if the data on there are valuable don't mess around and take the chance of making things worse. Check in with a local data recovery company (not a PC repair shop).
If it's outside your means financially, or you just want to have a go, then fair play. Just be aware you can lose it all in short order.

Have you checked out
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/m ... anual.html

?

gl

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