[svlug] Failing external drive. Planning to DD the failing drive to new external drive. Help please

[H P Ladds]

Experimenting with dd, ddrescue, rsync. Backing-up a 3 gig thumb drive to
new 2TB external hard drive.

My greatest success thus far: Rsync copyies all content from 3 gig
thumbdrive. However, I believe the partitions of a rsync transaction need
to be mounted. I can't mount one of the partitions of the failing drive. So
it won't help me recovery the data.

dd renders my new drive unrecognized by my computer. If I unplug the USB
and power, and then reconnect the drive it works, but no content is on the
new drive.

ddrescue results in one of these three: Renders the drive unrecognizable --
as discribed above.  Returns a "ddrescue no space left on device" message.
Or all seems to go well but mounting the new hard drive results in an empty
loop device being mounted (according to my file manager -- Dolphin.)

Thanks,
Preston





On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 10:44 AM, H P Ladds <householdwords at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I have an external hard drive failing and hope to DD the drive to a new
> external hard drive.
>
> Should I reformat the new drive to ext3 (or ext4) before DDing?
>
> The failing drive has two 500 gig partitions (I believe ext3). Should I DD
> the partitions separately or DD the entire drive?
>
> After DDing I'll try to retrieve the data. Oh and it is all data, no OS.
>
> TIA,
> Preston
>
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