LinuxQuestions.org - dd vs dd

Someone gave me a USB zip drive to try to recover some files off of. I think the 250MB zip disk is damaged or going bad.

Anyway, I tried using both dd and dd_rescue on Debian Etch. The output file from dd is ~100MB and the output file from dd_rescue is 0MB. Why did dd return an image and dd_rescue returned nothing?

I used

Code:

dd_rescue -v -l dd.log /dev/sdc zipddr.img

for dd_rescue and

Code:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/sdc of=/home/patrick/zip/ziprecover.img conv=noerror,sync

for dd.

Here's tail end of the dd_rescue log I created

Code:

dd_rescue: (info): /dev/sdc (98304.0k): EOF

Summary for /dev/sdc -> zipddr.img:

dd_rescue: (info): ipos:    98304.0k, opos:    98304.0k, xferd:    98304.0k

                  errs: 196608, errxfer:    98304.0k, succxfer:        0.0k

            +curr.rate:        0kB/s, avg.rate:      10kB/s, avg.load:  0.3%

When I try to mount the dd image on loopback it fails. I can't even get anything off the image with foremost. There's just supposed to be *.doc files on the disk (a teacher's lesson plans).

Any ideas on what I need to do to mount the image or recover files off of it (assuming of course it wasn't too damaged)?