[Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue recognizes partition but not whole drive

[Ian Solecki]

Hello there,

First let me thank you as many have before for ddrescue - it is a delightful tool.

I have a dying (perhaps dead?) 250gb hard drive with two partitions on it.  I was able to read the large partition (about 180gb) in Windows (mostly) but not the smaller (about 60gb) one, so I tried ddrescue on the smaller one first (more important files there).  I was able to image the smaller partition and rescue all of my files from the image with resounding success.

Now, a few days later, I turn my attention to the larger partition.  Unfortunately, the larger partition no longer appears to be recognized by ddrescue.

The entire drive (/dev/sdc) is listed in /proc/partitions with its full 250gb size, as is the smaller partition (/dev/sdc1) with its 60gb.  However, a "fsarchiver probe simple" reveals only /dev/sdc1, the smaller partition.

Testdisk can find no trace of /sdc at all.  Nor can Gparted, so I can't resize the smaller partition to contain the entire disk.

Interestingly, the GetDataBack program in Windows is able to identify the large partition and read some data from it, but it encounters endless errors that simply slow it down too much to be practical.

It may well be that this larger partition is now beyond salvageable, possibly due to the amount of usage the disk received while I was rescuing the other partition (ddrescue took about 20 hours, although I think that was my fault for copying to a USB drive).

SO - given all of this I am wondering if there is somehow a way to get/trick ddrescue to start at the very end of the /sdc1 partition and just continue its way into the rest of the drive?  Or perhaps I am doing something wrong in what I have described here?  I have tried running ddrescue with simply /dev/sdc as the input but I receive an input/output error.  It runs on /dev/sdc1 but won't allow me to -i any further than the end of the partition.

Any thoughts you may have are greatly appreciated!  Should your only thought be "nope, you're completely screwed" then I suppose that's that... maybe I'll try the freezer :S

Cheers,
Ian Solecki
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