Hi, quick question is it better to have the drive to backing up your files from (source drive) mounted or unmounted and what of the drive you are backing up your files to (destination drive)

Assuming you are not simply "cloning" your entire disk,

You need the source to be mounted (so you can read it) and the destination to be mounted (so you can write to it).

ddrescue /media/user/SourceDrive /media/user/DestinationDrive/Source.img /media/user/DestinationDrive/Source.log


Could someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong here because it finishes in a second recovering 0 bytes?

okay think I figured it out its

>> ddrescue /dev/sdc1 /media/user/DestinationDrive/Source.img /media/user/DestinationDrive/Source.log <<

I've had it on for hours and it still says it's only rescued 166354 kb??

Hours?? That's just 24 minutes since your "it finishes in a second recovering 0 bytes" message.

What does the rest of the status look like?

Okay the reason I said hours because I just knew after having it on for hours like last time it would only come to that and yet it did but only this time it did give me an error that I couldn't figure out how to resolve.
It said that I couldn't write to the logfile no more for some reason and asked either resolve the issue or abort. I don't understand this problem but I accidentally aborted with control-c option when I was actually trying to copy the error and paste it here

The last time I set the logfile to be written on my local desktop for some reason I could neither logon properly with my password after that and when I finally managed to log on my desktop, it was playing up really funny, I couldn't click on anything, it would just flash and nothing would happen when I tried to click on something. I restarted my computer and now cut a long story short, I decided to try ddrescue with an empty 500gb internal drive and write the logfile to the same drive instead of my local drive desktop and now here I am

How big was the partition you were trying to rescue? Your destination drive needs to have at least enough space for the entire source partition (all of it, not just the used part) plus the log file if you're storing that in the same place. When you don't show what status is actually displayed and just say, "I couldn't write to the logfile no more for some reason," I'm left guessing in the dark. Details are important. It sounds like you might have filled up the destination drive/partition and thus the write to the log file failed.

Well the partition I'm trying to rescue is 1tb but it only has 25gb of data on it that I would like to rescue. I've just changed write permissions to the destination drive and ddrescue seems to be working now continuing from where it left off. The bytes recovered are increasing now thank god!

Okay It's recovered 435gb but I don't want the whole TB recovered as I don't have enough space for that so I've interrupted it. Is that right? and how should I mount it?

There are a couple of ways to proceed.
You can use ddrescue to recover individual files. That only works if the filesystem is mountable (read-only, preferably) and the bad sectors are in the file's data blocks, not the filesystem metadata.

If the errors are just in isolated sections of the disk, you can use ddrescue] to attempt recovery of just that area. Earlier you reported that dd read about 166MB of partition 1 before hitting a bad sector. Let's see if the rest of the drive is good. TryIf that completes without error, you could do thisThat will give you a 300MB sparse file with the recovered portion of the source partition. If that all works, I can show you how to stitch together a virtual device that you should be able to mount and recover data from.

BTW, when you are imaging a partition it should not be mounted read/write.

Might be worth it to run the OEM diags. Sometimes they can fix issues.

Not sure you've proved what is bad just yet. Controller, cable and power issues still are there aren't they?

Hi. I think ddrescue work slow because your HD is to much damaged.
Patient, and good luck.