ddrescue running very slowly, will ext-3 be better?

[d3v]

Hi all, I'm yet again using ddrescue to recovery data from a hard drive that was dropped from a height. The drive itself is in great condition considering the physical shock it sustained as there is absolutely no clicking or metal-on-metal noises, and it stays very cool while ddrescue does it's work, however my complaint is the transfer speed of ddrescue. It is fluctuating from 800kb to 6mb per second and currently only 62gb of 500gb has been recovered in 15 hours.

After some googling I came across many places recommending the drive you are saving the data to be converted to ext-3 filesystem as NTFS has known speed issues with ddrescue. My question is how would I go about converting the drive to ext-3 considering the image file is already 62gb in to the 500gb "journey"?

I'm guessing...

1. CTRL+C to interrupt ddrescue.
2. reboot PC to Windows
3. move the image and log file from the drive to another
4. reformat the drive to ext-3 filesystem then drag the image and logfile back on to it
5. reboot to ddrescue and resume from where it left off

My concerns with the above process are firstly how do I convert NTFS to ext-3 within Windows 7? Would I need to boot to a live Linux CD to do this?? And secondly when the drive is converted to ext-3, will it show up in Windows and allow me to drag back over the image and log file, or again will I have to perform this file operation within a Linux live CD environment?

p.s when interrupting ddrescue using the CTRL+C command, do I also unmount the drives before rebooting the PC or is this unnecessary?

 

[codegreen]

I've saved images to NTFS without major speed issues before. But, if you want to switch your save-to drive to ext3...

I'm guessing...

1. CTRL+C to interrupt ddrescue.
2. reboot PC to Windows
3. move the image and log file from the drive to another
4. reformat the drive to ext-3 filesystem then drag the image and logfile back on to it
5. reboot to ddrescue and resume from where it left off

Correct, although you don't necessarily have to boot to Windows to move the image and log file.

My concerns with the above process are firstly how do I convert NTFS to ext-3 within Windows 7? Would I need to boot to a live Linux CD to do this??

You don't format a drive as ext3 in Windows. It is a native Linux filesystem. Use Linux to do the job. Look up the command "mkfs.ext3".

And secondly when the drive is converted to ext-3, will it show up in Windows and allow me to drag back over the image and log file, or again will I have to perform this file operation within a Linux live CD environment?

Windows can't read any of the ext filesystems by default. You can get an ext2 filesystem driver for Windows from fs-driver.org (ext3 is backwards compatible with ext2). However, once again, you're better off doing your file management from Linux.

p.s when interrupting ddrescue using the CTRL+C command, do I also unmount the drives before rebooting the PC or is this unnecessary?

Unnecessary. Just shut down or reboot properly and the system will unmount all drives automatically.

 

[d3v]

Yeah this is the first time using ddrescue where it has been unbearably slow. I really don't think it's the faulty drive because as I said it sounds healthy and isn't overheating at all.

Could I use the "mkfs.ext3" command on the drive using Ubuntu live cd or even the rescue CD remix 10.11 that I use ddrescue from??

 

[coffee]

Lets please backup and think this through a minute and then see if this makes sense to you:

You have a drive that was dropped and possibly might be damaged in some way. Everything at this point appears fine though.

Use something like a bootable clonezilla disk and save the partition(s) as images. Then work from the image files to recover data.

Think of this: What happens if your stressing the life out that disk and it gives up the ghost while doing hard reads in a recovery on it? Then you are all done from a practicle standpoint. It would be much better to do a one time backup of the partitions as images. Then mount the images. Then run recovery on the images. In the mean time you can take the disk and do a full checkout to make sure its in good working order.

Just my thoughts...

Best Regards,

coffee

 

[codegreen]

Could I use the "mkfs.ext3" command on the drive using Ubuntu live cd or even the rescue CD remix 10.11 that I use ddrescue from??

Yep. If you're more comfortable with a GUI, you can use Gparted or Ubuntu's Disk Utility (System > Administration > Disk Utility; not sure if it's on the Rescue Remix) to reformat the disk. Triple-check to make sure you're formating the right one!

 

[d3v]

Lets please backup and think this through a minute and then see if this makes sense to you:

You have a drive that was dropped and possibly might be damaged in some way. Everything at this point appears fine though.

Use something like a bootable clonezilla disk and save the partition(s) as images. Then work from the image files to recover data.

Think of this: What happens if your stressing the life out that disk and it gives up the ghost while doing hard reads in a recovery on it? Then you are all done from a practicle standpoint. It would be much better to do a one time backup of the partitions as images. Then mount the images. Then run recovery on the images. In the mean time you can take the disk and do a full checkout to make sure its in good working order.

Just my thoughts...

Best Regards,

coffee

I was under the impression that ddrescue does just that.. create an image of the drive, no?

 

[d3v]

Ok I just went about converting the transfer drive to ext3 file system and just hooked everything back up and got ddrescue to carry on from where it left off but it didn't seem to of increased the speed at all, however it has only been a few minutes so I'll let it run for a while more to get a more decisive answer.

edit: no difference in transfer speed, what a waste of time. Anyone got any ideas why ddrescue is taking so long at under 1mb a second?

 

[coffee]

I was under the impression that ddrescue does just that.. create an image of the drive, no?

I guess I will have to admit my brain is fried from a busy week.

I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that!

Best Regards,

coffee

 

[d3v]

Still very slow. Maybe the disk is scratched? Maybe a BIOS setting is causing it to be slow??

 

[coffee]

Most all the recovery work I do starts with clonezilla. I like the option in expert mode to skip bad sectors.

Perhaps ddrescue is trying to read bad sectors which would attribute to a longer process. Otherwise it could be a hardware issue of some sort. Either way I would just let it finish on its own. Sometimes with drives and the amount of data it can take a while.

How long has it been running?

 

[SilverLeaf]

ddrescue can sometimes take a while, especially with large drives that have a substantial amount of bad sectors. The parameters that you used to run the command also come into play.

Not too long ago, I had a badly damaged 80gb drive take over 18 hours (using "-r3" option) to complete! All the important data was there when it finally finished though.

 

[d3v]

Its now on 195gb of 500 and has been running for 72 hours so still a long way to go. The parameter I used was...

ddrescue /dev/sdc hdimage.img rescue.log

 

[300DDR]

The drive likely has physical damage due to the drop. I'm surprised it's gotten this far. Has it reported any bad/unrecoverable sectors yet? Is it Western Digital?

 

[d3v]

Hi, the drive is a toshiba and I don't think ddrescue reports bad sectors.
Anyhow ddrescue remained at 195gb for a full 8 hours running at a few hundreds bytes per second so I decided to pull the plug, but I have kept the image and log file so I can resume it at a later date.

 

[codegreen]

Try the reverse copy option using -R (capital R; it's case sensitive!). It will start at the end of the disk and work backwards. Don't forget to specify the same log and image file.

 

[d3v]

Try the reverse copy option using -R (capital R; it's case sensitive!). It will start at the end of the disk and work backwards. Don't forget to specify the same log and image file.

oh that does sound good, will give that a try very soon, thanks!

edit: are there any ramifications to using the reverse command? For example if I was to pause ddrescue then resume it at a later date would I have to begin it again in reverse?

 

[Ccomp5950]

No, as long as you use the same log file.

if kernel messages are set to hit the terminal (syslogd) you are on, it was probably reporting issues with the hard drive in it. Otherwise you would have to run something like dmesg to see what was going on. If it's chugging down on a small part chances are it's hitting errors and the error count was going up.

ddrescue -vb 4096 <source> <destination> <logfile>

is what I usually run. (verbose and block size of 4096 are the - options)

 

[Galdorf]

I find that ftk imager is much faster on bad drives also hdclone 4 is superfast on drives with quite a lot of bad sectors.
I use ftk imager most of the time it does a very good job in windows has a gui and best of all it's free but you have to sign up for it.