Restore DDRescue image to new drive?

[JustInspired]

Old Dell Dimension, beige plastic Pentium 3, Windows 98 pc, only booting to Safe Mode. Contains a software setup that would cost an absolute fortune to update/replace, no backups of any data, software or anything.

DDRescue image made of THIRTEEN year old hard drive. 50MB of 20GB not recovered.

Plan is to restore the image to a new drive, do a ScanDisk, ScanReg etc and hope that we can be up and running.

So, I've got a brand new 160GB drive or a selection of 40GB used ones I can use as replacements...

What's the syntax/command for DDRescue to apply the image file to a new drive?
Can I expect this to work or will there be issues in terms of boot sectors, drive geometry, etc etc?

Of course they want their machine back yesterday. Sigh.

Thanks for any advice you can offer. I'm very out of touch with good old Windows 9x I'm afraid.

 

[SilverLeaf]

This might help: http://www.technibble.com/forums/showpost.php?p=379723&postcount=2

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I use the whole guide by SilverLeaf frequently and thought the entire guide was worth posting a link to as well. http://www.technibble.com/guide-using-ddrescue-recover-data/

 

[glennd]

a similar job came in last thursday. very old laptop with XP and expensive business software that connects to industrial equipment. hard drive is failing and windows is not booting in any mode. need to get the machine back online asap. finally i get to try out ddrescue in a do or die situation. so i rubbed my hands together, pulled up SilverLeaf's guide and got to work.

i did a first run of ddrescue with minimal retries as recommended which took 4.5 hours. then i did a second run with higher retries to try to read the bad sectors. the end result was just 512 bytes unreadable. nice!

take the dead hard disk out, put a new hard disk in. tell ddrescue to put the image on the new drive which took about 2.75 hours (faster drive?). the only available new drive i had was one the same size, fingers crossed. boot up XP, it immediately goes into chkdsk mode and fixes a few entries. reboot. a working computer!!

sweet!

 

[Dave1320]

Good stuff!

 

[mrapoc]

I followed the guide the other day. Hard drive non mountable in windows and Linux. Ddrescue sorted it out 100% recovery. Amazing stuff!

 

[ohio_grad_06]

When in doubt use the larger drive. I think that if the other drives are but large enough the restore can fail.

 

[doubleohalex]

When in doubt use the larger drive. I think that if the other drives are but large enough the restore can fail.

This is because its a sector by sector image, or bit level image. Even though 2 different hard drives are labeled as the same size, this may not be true on the sector level. Different drives can have different number of sectors...so if the source drive has 1 more sector than the destination drive, the image/clone can fail.