It took forever, but I rescued everything from a corrupt drive onto a brand new one with ddrescue.

I would now like to clone my healthy drive to have a 2nd copy of everything. I was told this is the syntax to use:

dd if=/dev/src of=/dev/dst bs=512000 count=2000000

Just wanted to double check if that's correct? ... would hate to do anything to jeopardize the data on this new drive.

No need for count if you are cloning the entire drive

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

i ran my command: dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512000
(making double sure the source and destination drives were right)

but now dd just sort of hangs, there's a flashing cursor, but no other output.
is that normal?

i know for sure linux could see both drives, it showed them both to me in /dev/ ...
* the 'source' new drive that has my recovered data was listed as sdb, sdb1, sdb5, sdb6 (same partition layout as the old failed drive that was previously ddrescued onto it)
* the 2nd brand new drive was listed as sda.
* there were no other sd_ entries shown, nor any other drives connected to motherboard.

Yep

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

'bs' switch states: read and write BYTES bytes at a time
So if you change default 512 to 512000 dd can hang sometimes
And for checking what is going on with dd you have to use kill command:
kill -USR1 [dd PID]

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Odzyskiwanie danych - MyData.pl

Thanks for the info. I didn't realize when I ran it that dd is just kind of silent when it runs. But I believe it finished the clone job correctly.