Feedback on logfile created by DDrescue

[NNenov]

Hello,
I recently attempted to clone my dying drive (500gb) to a new 2TB drive, by following Jared's tutorial here on this forum:
how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html

The drive is not an OS drive, but it did contain my windows documents and the majority of installed windows applications and other linked folders.

On my first attempt DDrescue didn't manage to recover anything, there are bad sectors right at the start of the drive, so it said there was 1 error and it was 500GB in size.
So I ran the command again after a reboot, this time I added the -R trigger and was able to recover 450gb of the drive reading backwards.
I tried the command again twice with and without -R, both times with with -r 3, which seemed to recover a few megabytes extra. I have now shut down the system and wanted to ask for advice on my best course of action from here.

here is a screenshot of my logfile:

My theory is that there are more healthy sectors in that huge red blob, I base this theory only on how ddrescue acted on my first attempt, assuming the whole drive was unreadble because of the problematic first sector. Is there any way to tell it to skip the first few sectors and try? Or has it checked each sector and all 45gb is irretrievable? but if it has, then why did it assume the whole drive was irretrievable on the first attempt reading forwards?

 

[jasongan96]

Post the entire command you used. If ddrescue didn't get those blocks with 3 passes it's not going to get much else with 100 passes. At this point if the clone doesn't mount (which it probably won't), I would clone what you got to another drive that you could work with and then run testdisk to see if it can find a partition table.

 

[NNenov]

Hi Jason,

- First I checked the drive names;
the damaged old 500gb drive = sdb
the new 2tb drive = sda

-then I exectued the following:
ddrescue -f /dev/sdb /dev/sda nlog.log

this gave the 1 error of size 500gb

-then I restarted the system, deleted the log file (since it stated the whole drive was 1 big error), checked drive names again, and executed the following:
ddrescue -f -R /dev/sdb /dev/sda nlog.log

this successfully processed 450gb of data, basically what you see in the logfile screenshot.

-after completion, I kept the logfile, I executed the following, to try and recover more data:
ddrescue -f -R -A -r 3 /dev/sdb /dev/sda nlog.log

this seemed to rescue about 12mb more

-then I ran ddrescue one more time, trying again to read from start:
ddrescue -f -A -r 3 /dev/sdb /dev/sda nlog.log

no extra data was recovered.

thanks for the advice, so, would test disk not have to generate a new table? since the clone will contain nothing at its first sectors, if nothing was copied there surely there is nothing to find?
p.s. I've never used testdisk, am now in the process of finding out more about it.

 

[jol]

I think that the 44GB which wasn't rescued contains a Hugh amount of the data, (depends how much of the drive was full)
If ddrescue couldn't do it, the only thing you can try is send it to DR pro, who will try using hardware based
Also I would suggest to check out if the green ones are actually usable data

 

[Jared]

Your best course of action here would be to seek out professional recovery from someone who has professional imaging tools like DDI 4 or PC-3000. Typically this type of recovery isn't going to cost a ton of money, I know we charge $450 flat for such cases here.

If your data definitely isn't worth that much money, then you could give hddsuperclone a spin and see if it's able to do better. However I suspect the drive is one that's just going unstable when it hits bad sectors. So a hardware tool which can monitor and respond to the status of the drive to reset it when necessary is going to extract a lot more data.

 

[NNenov]

Thanks Jared, nah it really isn't worth it, I have my most important files backed up on other drives, I have another computer so this is mainly to avoid the headache of reinstalling tonnes of programs and potentially some saved files and presets/settings etc.
I'm trying with hddsuperclone now.

 

[Jared]

Let us know how it works out. I've been pretty impressed at how well it's handled some SAS drives that came in which we don't have hardware imaging tools for. Seems it's really well suited for the SCSI/SAS drives. I haven't tried it much with SATA drives though, as I've got hardware for that.

 

[jol]

Seems it's really well suited for the SCSI/SAS drives.

@Jared, Any difference between hddsuperclone and ddrescue ?

 

[Jared]

For SCSI and SAS, I'd say it's definitely better. I had one SAS drive come in as part of a RAID array that would immediately start clicking if any attempt was made to access it. Couldn't even attempt ddrescue. Yet, somehow HDDSuperclone was able to read 99.9997% from the drive. It'd occasionally start to click, but then the program would stabilize it and keep going.

 

[jol]

Interesting
Thanks for the info