[Bug-ddrescue] Mac OS X, 10.5.5, MacBook Pro 120 GB drive recovery

[Melissa Graesser]

Hi,

First, I do want to thank you for creating ddrescue. I have not yet  
recovered my data but am hopeful. I have tried several other tools,  
TechTool Pro, Disk Warrior, Stellar Phoenix, with not much luck. I  
like the ddrescue feature that allows me to stop it and then restart  
it. I am in the process of recovering a failing hard drive using  
ddrescue 1.8 which I built. My drive has never been dropped or  
anything it just would not wake up from sleep one day and after a  
force reboot the MacBook cannot find the system or drive. Disk Utility  
can see it but said the b-tree was corrupted when I tried to verify  
it. Disk Utility cannot mount the drive. Disk Warrior gets many  
errors. Apple is scheduled to replace the drive under AppleCare, but I  
will not be able to get my drive back or any chance of recovering  
data. So, I was very happy when I found ddrescue. I think my drive has  
several bad blocks. So I told ddrescue to skip the bad blocks with the  
-n option. It has been running for 8 days now and should finish  
tomorrow at the rate it is going. My hard drive I am recovering is 120  
GB SATA, Hitachi. I ran ddrescue with the commands:

sudo ./ddrescue -v -n /dev/disk1s2 MyVolImage.dmg MyVolRescue.log

My question is ddrescue reports, errors: 1071 and errsize: 28775 MB.  
So I still have a lot of data that has not been recovered. After  
ddresue is finished for the first pass I would like to try and recover  
more if possible with the parameters -r 2 so it will retry twice. Does  
ddrescue automatically try going backwards after it has finished or do  
I need to specify I want it to try. After it finished before trying to  
recover more data I was going to copy the image over to a new hard  
drive partition on an external fire wire drive which I have created a  
partition of the same size as my original bad hard drive was, 111.5  
GB. This is the size Disk Utility reports even though it is 120 GB  
hard disk. I am assuming the drive has already blocked out bad blocks  
because the difference in 120 and 111 is more then the usual. I have  
read these drives try to do that. Then I am assuming I will have to  
run Tech Tool Pro to clean the image up.

I am running everything from an external hard drive right now.

Thanks,

Melissa