Re: [Bug-ddrescue] how big should my MBR rescue be?

[Ian Simmons]

Jim,
Thank you for your reply.

The reason I am attempting a rescue is, the drive quit working on my
friends system. He could not get it to boot up. When I tried mounting it
in Ubuntu, it says the drive is not a valid NTFS. When I run "sudo fdisk
-l" It shows 5 partitions with number 3 and 4 being over the cylinder
boundaries and it also has a fat partition that my friend claims to know
nothing about. Knowing my friend, I concluded that it is possible that
he used a third party partitioning/resizing tool at some point cause I
remember us both playing around with partition magic once. A lot of
people who don't understand the error message given by partition magic
about cylinder boundaries will go ahead and apply the changes anyway and
it's just luck that it works. I don't know much about it either and this
is just speculation on my part so I really don't know if the drive is
messed up or just needs to be reformatted.

Hopefully I will just be lucky as you say and be able to mount the image
and manually copy the files once ddrescue is finished.

In the mean time I'll be reading up on recovery tools incase I have to
rebuild the files.

Thanks for the helpful response. :-)


On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 15:29 -0400, James Bardin wrote:
> 
> Ian Simmons wrote:
> > 
> > The problem is that for some reason the first partition which is the
> > active windows partition starts at  133677. I ran it anyway and rescued
> > 1332 MB. Is it safe to assume that the MBR is in there somewhere?
> > 
> 
> No. The mbr is most likely still in the first sector, but if your not
> trying to make a bootable copy, then you don't need it.
> 
> 
> > I plan on installing a fresh copy of Windows to the drive which has a
> > invalid ntfs,
> 
> I hope you're not planning on installing on the same drive that's
> already failed?
> 
> 
> > and all I'm trying to do is rescue files. When the rescue
> > of /dev/sdh1 is finished will it be possible to mount the backup.img and
> > just copy the files out of it or will I need to use ddrescue to restore
> > the image to a drive?
> 
> It depends on whether the filesystem is intact. If you're lucky, you'll
> be able to simply mount the rescue image and copy files. If not, you'll
> need to rebuild the files with a recovery tool. ddrescue only does the copy.
> 
> 
> > 
> > Also, I am using ddrescue because I read that it works faster by doing
> > what dd_rhelp and dd_rescue accomplish by getting the good sectors
> > first. It is working at the same slow pace of 130kb per second as
> > dd_recue did. It has been running over 24 hours to rescue only 4 Gigs
> > and reports not one bad sector so far. Is this normal?
> > 
> 
> Not usually, but it depends on what's wrong with your drive.
> 
> -jim
> 
> 
>