[Bug-ddrescue] Help rescuing my 500GB disk

[Andrej Trobentar]

Hello all,

I have a 2,5" Hitachi 500GB disk connected to a USB-to-SATA converter 
(/dev/sdb1) with a NTFS filesystem on it that is failing and want to 
recover as much data as possible using ddrescue. During the recovery I'm 
also cooling the disk as much as possible.

Since I'm fairly new to data recovery I would first like to check with 
you guys, so I don't throw a couple of days away by experimenting :)

Here's what I did so far :

1) Because I know it is a NTFS partition and want to recover only the 
used portion of the partition I ran :
"ddru_ntfsbitmap /dev/sdb1 /tmp/domain_logfile"


2) Then I run ddrescue with the following parameters to create a disk 
image :
"ddrescue -m /tmp/domain_logfile -v /dev/sdb1 /tmp/Image.img /tmp/Image.log"


Now, if my disk stops working (is unresponsive) I'll just power cycle 
the USB-to-SATA converter to get it working and then run :
"ddrescue -A -v /dev/sdb1 /tmp/Image.img /tmp/Image.log"


When the ddrescue completes, I'll just run :
- "fsck.ntfs /tmp/Image.img"
- "mount -o loop /tmp/Image.img /mnt/Image"
and copy the data from /mnt/Image to a safe place



That's my theory :) Now to my questions :
- is my way of thinking right here?
- if I cancel the ddrescue process with CTRL+C (or there is a power 
failure) should the image file created so far be mountable or must I 
wait for ddrescue to finish?
- what if power cycling the converter doesn't start up the disk at one 
point and I get an "unfinished" image - can I still recover something?


Many thanks for your help,

    Andrej.