This is not a bug report about ddrescue, only a recommendation to update the documentation for ddrescue.
I am primarily a Windows user. I had problems with a WD 2TB external USB hard drive, and after a web search, found that ddrescue was the best available tool for getting as much data off the drive as possible. So I bought a 2TB Samsung SATA drive, installed it in my PC, downloaded the Parted Magic distribution for USB flash, and started the recovery process. After about 10 GB had been copied, I interrupted, and verified that I could restart (I am using a logfile on the USB stick). Everything worked well, so I let it continue recovery over night. The next morning, the PC was needed for use with Windows XP SP3. So I shutdown, removed the external USB drive (the source), and rebooted Windows. I hadn't realized what would happen. The destination disk was an internal drive in the PC, and Windows saw a valid partition table entry for the ntfs partition, but detected inconsistencies, and tried to "fix" things. So before I started the recovery again, I used gparted and marked the partition of the USB external hard drive as hidden. Then I deleted my ddrescue logfile and started ddrescue over again (since I had no idea what blocks Windows had modified on the partially recovered destination drive). After about 10 GB had been copied, I interrupted, verified with gparted that both the source and destination disks' partitions were hidden, and then shutdown. I rebooted Windows XP, and this time it did not try to fix the drive. The important concept is that any partially copied partitions should be hidden before allowing them to be touched by any operating system that is going to attempt to mount and "fix" the partitions it sees. You could hide the partitions on the destination drive, but if you don't want Windows to see the drive you are recovering from (to prevent any changes), then marking the partitions on the input drive will also ensure that the output drive will have hidden partitions as well (since the partition table is copied too), and it will insulate your drives from Windows. After the copy is complete, then the partitions of the output device can be unhidden, and then the checking/fixing of the drive may be appropriate. _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue
