Re: DDRescue screwed up on NTFS drive backup, partition won't read now

[Matthias Böttcher]

Hi Travis,

you must have mixed up sdb and sdc.
In every line in shitball2.log mentioning the Toshiba drive is a
mapping to sdb and the WDC drive is always mapped to sdc.There is no
swapping for this assignment.

The ddrescue command writes from /dev/sdb1 to /dev/sdc1 ->  from
Toshiba (new) to WDC (old).

shitball.log shows:
#      pos        size  status
0x00000000  0x6137C0000  +
0x6137C0000  0x1CBAD740000  ?

I'm sorry, you have overwritten the first 26096697344 bytes
(0x6137C0000 == 24.3 GiB) on your NTFS partition at the WDC drive with
data from the NTFS partition at the Thoshiba drive.
This explains the errror for the WDC drive "Failed to read last sector
(3907024894)".
Sector 3907024894 is at 2.0 TB respectively 1.82 TiB. This is the size
of the NTFS partition at the Thoshiba drive.


Best regards,
Matthias


Am Mi., 25. Mai 2022 um 02:41 Uhr schrieb Travis Sherwood
<cd9asherwood@yahoo.com>:
>
> Hello,
>
> I know this may not be your area, but I need help. OS is Ubuntu Mate 18.04.
>
> I was trying to make a backup on my External WD Elements 1.5TB drive (SDB1, 
> name is Elements, NTFS partition) onto a brand new Toshiba 2tb drive (SDC1, 
> name is Toshiba EXT, NTFS partition). Before starting, the drive was working 
> and mounting fine and was never part of any Raid. It held approximate 550gb 
> of data too.  Gparted would not make a copy if it for some reason and the 
> Disk Utility was going extremely slow too, presumably due to the large size 
> of the drive. I believe it says ~30 hours to make the image and would 
> completely fill the Toshiba drive due to the image size being equal to disk 
> size.
>
> In DDrescue-GUI, I set it up to image the source Elements drive over to the 
> target Toshiba one, with a log map file and a log file. After waiting 2 hours 
> and only getting to 1% with 10+ days remaining, I had to abort the backup at 
> approx 29gb. That's when things got weird.
>
> The WD drive was relabeled the same as the Toshiba one and the 
> previously-working NTFS partition will not mount any longer.
> Windows claimed it was not formatted, and I did not attempt to do so as it 
> would make this problem impossible to resolve.
>
> Gparted sees the NTFS partition, but cannot mount it now.
> Under "Information", this is what it says now:
> Failed to read last sector (3907024894): Invalid argument
> HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet,
>    or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...),
>    or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
>    or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
>    or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).
> Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
> The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
> Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
> partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?
>
> Unable to read the contents of this file system!
> Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
> The cause might be a missing software package.
> The following list of software packages is required for ntfs file system 
> support:  ntfs-3g / ntfsprogs.
>
>
> Testdisk can see the Image, but I am afraid to do anything for fear of 
> destroying everything if I try something and it does not work, has to be 
> aborted, or gets weird again.
> The data on this drive is irreplaceable and this is why I was trying to make 
> a backup of it.
> I have included the log files DDRescue-GUI made. "Shitball" is the log it 
> made while it was working. "Shitball2" is the log it made after I had to 
> abort it.
>
> How do I fix this?
>
> thank you,
> Travis Sherwood