Sigh - got it. Lesson learned on mount points. Trying again.

@Einstein -

Scott

Thanks Vulcan. I made sure I was saying "/dev/sda" instead of "/media/sda". In the actual command line, I was doing it correctly (through luck - didn't understand the difference), and only typed "/media/sda" in the forum posting.

Regardless, trying it again to be sure, and it copies zero sectors.

I did accidentally copy the thumb drive to the target drive. That was cute. Couldn't figure out why when I booted from the CD, I had two "Lexar" drives listed. "WTF?" I said. That one took me a while to figure out (yes, the 16GB drive was the thumb drive, not the bad drive that is clicking).

Ok, ok, I get it. I see why you guys are well paid to fix harddrives.

Thanks for clearing-up that the drescue commands in your comment using /media were typos, and valid commands were actually typed (though since I don't know in which order your system recognised / enumerated the source & destination drives, I can't say that the command was actually correct or not.... ) and for explaining what that 16GB drive was (i.e. it wasn't the clicking drive).

In my experience using ddrescue with various drives, copying zero sectors is unusual, though not impossible, for a drive which reports correctly in the BIOS. You might have reached the end of a DIY recovery attempt, if the drive really is that sick, or there may be some other problem, which would require interpretation of the relevant Linux error messages when running ddrescue, to try to identify.

Thx Vulcan et al. At this point, I'm going to give the self help session a rest. ddrescue seems to be a bust on this particular set of drives .

Ddrescue CAN work but there is a lot more work to do and test BEFORE cloning. This is the difficult part...

If you not familiar with Linux don't use it, I said it before and say it again use Media Tools Pro...before you wreck your drive.

Cheers

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