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Questions tagged [ddrescue]

ddrescue is a data recovery tool that copies data from one file or block device to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.

GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disk, CD-ROM, USB stick, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.

This tool is very popular among forensics experts because it allows the user to easily (and repeatedly) save the good parts from a damaged disk or device with certain ease.

ddrescue cannot be used as a filter i.e. in a pipe (while dd can). This is because in general it needs to jump back and forth inside the files (or block devices) to do its job.

More information and sample usage can be found in the GNU ddrescue manual.

Note that one may confuse GNU ddrescue with another tool of similar name: dd_rescue. To learn the difference between the two refer to this Ask Ubuntu answer.

167 questions
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Is there any way to speed up ddrescue?

I had a 500GB drive HDD crash about 5 days ago. I used ddrescue on the important partition a few days ago, and it's been on "Trimming failed blocks" for almost 2 days now. Original command: ddrescue -n /dev/rdisk1s2 /Volumes/OSXBackup/rdisk1s2.img…
Matt Beckman
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how to resume ddrescue process?

I have to recover my 1TB USB HD. I'm using ddrescue to accomplish this. Is there a way that I can resume ddrescue once I start it? I'm using the command: ddrescue /dev/sdd1 ./bye1t.dd_rescue.image
confiq
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4 answers

File copying utility like rsync with error handling like ddrescue, for data recovery from a hard drive with bad sectors or hardware failure

I have a hard drive with either bad blocks or sectors that are failing to read due to potential mechanical issues, such as a bad disk head, bad motor, or some other issue that is causing the hard drive to read data excruciatingly slowly and with…
purefusion
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How to change hdd read error timeout?

I'm recovering data from an hdd using ddrescue. With "retry" disabled, it takes roughly 30 seconds for every unreadable sector. The hdd has tens of thousands of bad sectors and the process is taking forever. Can I shorten the read error timeout to,…
netvope
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Why is it impossible to compress on the fly images by ddrescue?

I'm trying to recover files on a dying hard drive, using GNU's ddrescue. The drive is rather large (1TB), and all I have to store the image is another 1TB drive. ddrescue fails near the end, with an error about disk space, even with the -S…
Manu
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3 answers

How can I generate a list of files from a list of sectors?

I've had a hard disk failure and managed to rescue some data from the disk (1TB) with GNU's ddrescue. The last 800GB of the disk were perfect, no single error, but in the first 200GB there were almost 14000 errors (badblocks) spread across the area.…
Miguel Santos
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2 answers

Mounting a complete disk image rescued by ddrescue

I've recovered a complete NTFS disk with ddrescue in Linux. The catch is I didn't just rescue the partition (sdX#) but complete disk (sdX) with partition table. It's really easy to mount disk partitions as loopback devices, but is there a way to…
bayindirh
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How can I find out which sectors are used by files on NTFS?

I'm recovering data from a failing hard drive using ddrescue. It's a 2TB disk, NTFS filesystem, but only about 200GB or so is actually used, so rescuing it in its entirety would be a big ol' waste of time. I've rescued enough data from the beginning…
user1655754
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1 answer

Drive recovery – `ddrescue` hanging

I'm using ddrescue to recover files from a hard drive. Details: 500GB SATA drive, 2 Partitions (e.g. sdb2, sdb3) – each with about 200 GB of data, connected with SATA adapter to USB, running: sudo ddrescue -d /dev/sdb2 sdb2.img sdb2.logfile --force…
monokh
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What causes this HDD sector damage pattern?

Out of curiosity, I ran GNU ddrescue on a Seagate ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB hard drive with known bad sectors, and then I visualized the ddrescue mapfile with ddrescueview. When I zoomed in, this interesting pattern appeared: The green gaps…
Deltik
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3 answers

ddrescue reset usb device on read timeout

I have a damaged external usb hdd. When i connect the device to the pc i can access the file system for round about a minute. After that period the disk keeps spinning but every io operation times out. To rescue my data i want to use ddrescue but…
Pretasoc
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2 answers

ddrescue from drive intermittantly cutting out, ways to automate power cycling via software?

Have a failed Windows/NTFS drive. I was able to connect to another PC via USB-to-IDE cable and recover most of the drive with a Knoppix 7.2 LiveUSB and ddrescue/ddrutitliy. I've recovered most critical data. Now I'm using it as a learning exercise…
Nick J
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3 answers

Reading bad blocks from hard disk too slow in Linux

I'm trying to recover data from an old 320G hard drive (full of bad sectors) to a new one. I found that ddrescue is a good tool for this task due to it's smart algorithm. I have already done this once with following command: ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda…
lolimperator
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How to mount NTFS partition image in Windows created with dd on Linux?

As per the title, I need to work with an image created from Linux via ddrescue /dev/sda3 image.img in Windows. Notice that this is an image of a partition, not the entire drive. How can this be mounted in Windows 10?
ylluminate
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Do I need to format/partition ddrescue destination drive?

I am trying to recover data from a failing hard drive using GNU ddrescue on Ubuntu. I used the following command: sudo ddrescue -f /dev/sda /dev/sdb [path to mapfile] So far it is working speedily and without issue. My concern is about the…
Kyle Ingraham
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