Questions on DD rescue cloning to internal harddrive

[helgatheviking]

i read another thread on making a clone of a failed disk with ddrescue from a linux recovery live disk like so:

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sudo ddrescue --force -v -r 5 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb log

my questions are:

/dev/sdc is the "bad drive" in this instance. why wouldn't i use /dev/sdc1 is that is the partition on /sdc shown by fdisk?

will i lose everything in /dev/sdb? ie will everything be overwritten by the contents of /sdc? if so, how can i avoid that? the drive i am attempting to rescue is a 500gb fantom usb and i'd like to store the contents of the image on my internal hard drive.

i've sort of pieced the following together and am wondering if it is correct. should i?

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sudo mkdir /media/USB

sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask 0222 /dev/sdc1 /media/USB

sudo ddrescue --force -v -r 5 /dev/sdc /media/USB/image.dd /media/USB/log

i think this was working last night, but it stalled and so i have to start again. i'm glad to have read the tip on storing the log file. finally, should i expect this to take days to copy?

[cgrenier]

[quote="helgatheviking"]i read another thread on making a clone of a failed disk with ddrescue from a linux recovery live disk like so:

Code: Select all

sudo ddrescue --force -v -r 5 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb log

my questions are:

/dev/sdc is the "bad drive" in this instance. why wouldn't i use /dev/sdc1 is that is the partition on /sdc shown by fdisk?

will i lose everything in /dev/sdb?
[quote]
In your example, /dev/sdc is the damaged disk and /dev/sdb the destination. Everything on /dev/sdb will be lost/overwritten.
When the destination is a disk, the source must also be a disk.
When the destination is a file, the source can be a disk or a partition.
In both case, you should always use a log file (here the file is named log) as the copy can take days or even weeks.
For a first try, instead of "-r 5" (5 retries), you may choose to use "-n" (don't split the read on error).