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I have a 2TB WD Black drive and would like to simply do a straight clone from a failing 3TB drive to it. Both are SATA. Will I be able to just install the new drive alongside the faulty one and then do the clone/rescue attempt with ddrescue or is there a better method?

The faulty internal drive mentioned has bed sectors although am usually able to boot into Windows 7 Ultimate with it and navigate and access all my programs.

I have been attempting some trials with an Ubuntu Live CD using ddrescue but am not sure I'm doing it right. I have a 3TB WD my book essential external which is GPT and have created a separate 2TB partition on it which I am trying to clone to.

I assume I need to format the new drive first to NTFS? Can I do that via the Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12-04 live DVD that I've been booting with?

random
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ron
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1 Answers1

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Indeed, GNU ddrescue is a good choice. Use it e.g. with 10 retries in case of errors:

ddrescue -r 10 -v /dev/faulty_drive /dev/external_drive optional_logfile.log

Note that by using the above command you are going to overwrite all data on your external hard drive.

Perhaps a safer way is to backup the data to an image file on your external hard drive instead:

ddrescue -r 10 -v /dev/faulty_drive /path/to/external/drive/image.file

For this you may need a file system on your external drive that supports file sizes of 2TB or more (e.g. ext2 and ext3 support file sizes up to 2TB whereas ext4, HFS+, or NTFS support even larger file sizes).

Example where /dev/sda is the faulty drive and /dev/sdb3 is the external partition (ext4) to write the image file to (run all commands as root):

mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt/external
ddrescue -r 10 -v /dev/sda /mnt/external/faulty.img /mnt/external/rescue.log
umount /mnt/external

Afterwards, if you want to mount specific partitions of your faulty hard drive image file faulty.img, you have to use corresponding mount offsets or tools like kpartx.

Another example taken from ddrescue infopages to rescue a whole disc /dev/hda to /dev/hdb:

First backup all error-free areas:

ddrescue -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb logfile

Then try to recover any bad sectors:

ddrescue -dr3 /dev/hda /dev/hdb logfile
speakr
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