On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Michael Schierl schierlm@gmx.de wrote:
When you have cloned a dying hard disk with ddrescue (and were able to only copy a fraction of the information) your first choice should not be CHKDSK. CHKDSK primarily tries to restore the filesystem into a consistent state, which means that directories that are only partially readable will be completely lost completely afterwards - not very good if you try to rescue data.
yikes! I had no idea. thank you for the correction.
Note that cloning from a failing drive can take a long time (hours to days), cloning the healthy clone afterwards is much faster.
curious about ddrescue, I'm reading the wiki page now:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue
does ddrescue want to copy data to a hard drive of the same size? I seem to recall running into this issue with free imaging tools in the past. if not, it seems like ddrescue + netcat would make an awesome free alternative to ghost.