Re: [Bug-ddrescue] What am I doing wrong? ddrescue: cannot open output file: not a directory

[DePriest, Jason R.]

On 10/10/07, televiseus <> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I had my windows C drive stop booting and have been trying to run ddrescue
> on it to get as much off it as possible. Despite being a total noob to linux
> and thanks to the helpful posts on this mailing list and some research I've
> been able to do these things so far:
>
> I found ddrescue 1.5 and some other useful on a Parted Magic Live CD.
>
> I booted with the live cd and partitioned the 300gb usb hdrive i want the
> ddrescue outfile to go to. It now has 3 ntfs partitions (sda1 is the
> original resized partition that was on the external and sda2 and sda3 are
> ntfs partitions that are 74.32gb each to match the size of the partition I
> want ddrescue to copy off my bad laptop drive), sda4 is an ext3 12gb
> partition I made for the ddrescue logfile and scratchfiles, etc.
>
> The problem comes when I try to start ddrescue from the live cd terminal to
> have it copy my bad hd partition hda1 which is on the laptop hd installed in
> the ide slot. I want it to send that copy to the empty ntfs partition of
> matching size I created on the external drive (sda2 or sda3) and I want the
> logfile to go to the new ext3 partition (sda4).
>
> Here is the command I have been trying:
>
> # ddrescue -n /dev/hda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda4/baddisk.log
>
> but everytime I've tried I get an error that says: ddrescue: cannot open
> output file: not a directory
>
> I've also tried /dev/sda3, /dev/sda2/test (after creating a folder called
> 'test'), /dev/sda2/test/baddisk.img, but I continue to get the same error.
>
> I'd be willing to bet I'm overlooking something obvious, but I'm stumped.
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Aaron Hartwell

Try mounting /dev/sda4 and putting the logfile there.
like
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda4 /somedirectory
then do
ddrescue -n /dev/hda1 /dev/sda2 /somedirectory/baddisk.log
where /somedirectory is an empty directory that you create or an
unused entry in /mnt or /media

-Jason