drive mounting ddrescue

[quinnlaup]

hey folks,

I've got a quick question about running ddrescue, does the source drive have to be mounted? Ubuntu labels the drive as /dev/sdc/ but i cannot mount the windows partition or either of the other two partitions on the disc. Will ddrescue be able to copy the whole disc?

kind regards

quinnlaup

[iisjman07]

No it doesn't have to mount a drive to be able to use it (necessarily). If you wanted to do A direct disk-to-disk clone then you can use the syntax

ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

- that will copy the disk at sda to the disk at sdb; neither needs to be mounted. If you wanted to do a disk to image clone (I believe you can do this in ddrescue) then you can use the following commands to copy /dev/sda to a file on /dev/sdb:

mkdir /mnt/sdb1

Mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

Ddrescue /dev/sda /mnt/sdb1/clonedimage.img

That will make a directory to mount the first partition on /dev/sdb in the /mnt directory, mount the partition at /dev/sdb1 to /mnt/sdb1, and then clone /dev/sda (entire disk) to a file in the mounted file system of /mnt/sdb1. When you're finished you should use the following command to unmount the file system to prevent data loss:

umount /mnt/sdb1

(point that to whatever mount point you mounted to earlier).

If you want anymore help just ask