temojen's Journal: ntfsclone refuses to clone corrupted disk?!?!

It has an option for dealing with bad sectors... but refuses to run if there's corruption... which is caused by bad sectors...

me@VBox-Kubuntu:~/linux-ntfs-2.0.0/ntfsprogs$ diff ntfsclone.c~ ntfsclone.c
401,403c401,403
< if (opt.ignore_fs_check && !opt.metadata)
< err_exit("Filesystem check can be ignored only for metadata "
< "cloning!\n");
---
> // if (opt.ignore_fs_check && !opt.metadata)
> //err_exit("Filesystem check can be ignored only for metadata "
> // "cloning!\n");

Whoops

[Captain Splendid]

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want

Why ntfsclone?

[Short Circuit]

Why ntfsclone in this instance? Wouldn't one of the ddrescue variants be more appropriate? (ddrescue, gddrescue, dd_rescue...Hell, I don't know. I think there are two different programs, but the bin name seems to change depending on which distro you use.)

This circumstance feels like the developers were pushed into supporting more circumstances than they wanted to target. My guess is that ntfsclone is targeted more at forensics and filesystem debugging, and that data recovery isn't its primary goal.

Re:

[temojen]

cool, thanks, that works much better

Re:

[Short Circuit]

Heh. NP.

It also happens to work pretty well for backups of unencrypted CDROMs and DVD media. (If a DVD has CSS encryption, you can't back up the CSS keys by talking to the DVD-ROM drive as a normal block device.)

Re:

[temojen]

I usually try to avoid needing extreme recovery tactics, but this is someone else's HDD. 4 years of travel photography... zero backups.

Re:

[Short Circuit]

ddrescue isn't extreme. Extreme is when you have to put the drive in the freezer to get it to run long enough to get more data. I had a coworker put an entire laptop in the refridgerator. Wish I'd taken a picture...