Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Need fast recovery settings for ddrescue

[James W. Watts]

This definitely solved the "write error: File too large" problem. I formatted the recovery drive to NTFS and started over. Things are coming along nicely. The image is 30GB so far. But the damaged drive's 500GB. So looks like I'm in for a few days.

What about the ddrescue command parameters? Could I have constructed mine differently for speed? I'm just worried that the damaged drive will fail completely before the operation finishes on its own.

I tried using the "-i" (input position) and "-s" (max size) options as shown in the ddrescue manual. However these did not work for me. Or more likely I do not understand what they do.

Also, please elaborate on what "-t" (truncate) does. The manual simply states "Truncate output file". But what does this mean?

But what I want to know most is about the command parameters. How would you construct it to maximize the speed of the recovery?

James

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From: andrew zajac <address@hidden>
To: ddrescue <address@hidden>; James W. Watts <address@hidden>
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 1:46:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Need fast recovery settings for ddrescue

Hi James.

I assume the destination drive is formatted with a FAT filesystem.

You need to use a filesystem that supports files that are bigger than 4Gigs.  I use ext3, but you can also use NTFS.  Trying to create an image file that is 500Gigs large on a FAT filesystem will not work.

I hope this helps.


--- On Sat, 10/25/08, James W. Watts <address@hidden> wrote:

From: James W. Watts <address@hidden>
Subject: [Bug-ddrescue] Need fast recovery settings for ddrescue
To: "ddrescue" <address@hidden>
Received: Saturday, October 25, 2008, 8:31 AM

Hello all. I'm on the mailing list for this fantastic recovery software and I've learned lots reading through all the different posts. Hope you can help me.

I have a damaged drive that is nearly full with music files (mp3s). It belongs to a DJ and I need to get his files back quickly. The damaged drive is a 500GB internal SATA drive and the recovery drive is a 650GB external USB drive. Both drives are connected to the computer via USB adapters. As for the physical setup, is this good for speed? The computer I'm using is a relatively modern laptop with USB 2.0 ports.

What settings or parameters would you use when issuing the ddrescue command for this task? Assume the drive has lots of sector errors and that most of the files are 4-10 MB in size.

I need to pull an image quickly so I can start Photorec on it and get back the MP3s. I ran ddrescue for two days with the following command, but only have 4GB so far. As a test, I ran Photorec against the partial recovery image and got back lots of working MP3s. So the data is definitely intact, it's just going very slowly.

My command
sudo ddrescue -v -d -n /dev/Damaged_Drive /Media/Recovery_Drive/image.img /Media/Recovery_Drive/image.log


Also, this morning I checked on the recovery process to discover the following message:

ddrescue: write error: File too large

Any ideas? Please tell me how I can make a quick image? At this rate it could take longer than a month.

Thank you,

James
Charlotte, NC

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