Yes, that should work as long as the destination partition is of same or larger size as the source partition. However, you do not need to format the destination partition, format structure will be carried over from the source partition. If the destination partition is larger than the source partition, one "resize2fs" command can add remaining space to the filesystem.

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Whatever happened there has nothing to do with the blocksize.

Please always show us full commands & full output, no paraphrasing.

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NO! While that would work exactly as you asked, I don't recommend it. The new partition will be exactly the same as the one on sdx and will gain nothing since it is now on the new drive with the same warts and blemishes. You could (space permitting) mount the new partition you just created somewhere like /mnt then copy the device to an image file with
Now you have an image file to work with instead of the original, possibly failing, sdx. You might then look at ddrescue or photorec as a tool to assist in recovery of your files from the image. Ddrescue scans the entire drive or image attempting to make a clean image. Photorec scans the entire drive or image attempting to recover files.

You also could use ddrescue or photorec on the original drive or partition but that is not recommended since the recovery efforts would hammer the mechanical drive and potentially cause cascading failure.

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I'm scratchin' my head trying to understand why you're trying to bend 'dd' -- which is intended to do block-by-block copying of objects like devices and/or individual files and not directory trees -- into a tool for backing up multiple files. There are much, much better tools whose purpose in life is to copy files. Some of them have even been mentioned above. And most of those -- esp. rsync, find|cpio, and, I'm reasonably sure, "cp -R" (actually don't use that one too much myself) -- avoid the problem with spaces-in-filenames that your original post mentioned that you were worried about.

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There are actually millions of "items" - will this command still work without error?

Does photorec look for "all files on the hdd" including both non-deleted and deleted, or just 'deleted' files?

I used
...worked without an apparent problem, copying almost 1 million items, but the 'target' hdd did have 3,000 less files in the end. The most important thing are the deleted files.

Decided not to use the partitions in the command. My reason was just trying to copy "to" an ext4 hdd filesystem - the source hdd is not ext4.

For just copying files I will use rsync.

After rereading the answers posted, i see you say to break up the files if a large amount. Thanks.

It seems safer to break up the whole hdd into multiple partitions in case there is a problem with opening 1 partition, and that were the only partition on the entire hdd. With multiple partitions, less chance data loss - my opinion after reading.

Agree/ disagree?

Absolutely, data recovery a lot faster on smaller partitions also. Which gets the partition re-formatted and back in service much faster after a Whoops! also. But ultimately, have a backup drive of same or larger size and back up your data, then you don't have to mess with recovery efforts in a Whoops! event. Not hard to back up operating systems in compressed files also.

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Thanks.

NOTHING SHOWS UP IN DESTINATION DIRECTORY "/mnt/6BLACK.COPY.HDD2"

TRIED 2 WAYS – WITH & WITHOUT “/” AFTER SOURCE DIRECTORY AND DESTINATION DIRECTORY

sudo rsync -av --dry-run /media/mnt/K /mnt/6BLACK.COPY.HDD2

sudo rsync -av --dry-run /media/mnt/K/ /mnt/6BLACK.COPY.HDD2/

The result above is from the first one; using second one, nothing reported to transfer based on terminal output --- just zeros show up for 'bytes received' 'speedup'...........

Correct. That is by design.

There are three options there, each explained in the manual page. Even if you don't like to, it is important to look at each of the options at least once in the manual page, especially before trying random formulas from the net.

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Thanks. I didn't think that the command you posted was random - i felt i could trust it at face value.

I think everyone here tries, but errors do creep in. The formula has a safety added to reduce the likelihood of damage in the event of an error in either the formula or its application. Again, the idea is that you must take a quick look in the manual page at the program's description and each of the three options before it will actually write.

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