My decision to install Linux alongside W7 was prompted initially by a need to repair a failing hard drive.

After doing a little research, I figured that I should learn more about Linux, rather than just do a temporary install for the drive repair.

So my questions are:
1) Which distro of Linux is easiest to get started with? and
2) How do I get DDRescue added to the system?

NOTE: I'm a retired PC builder and serviceman with 25+ years of Windows experience, so I can get the preliminaries and partitioning part of the job set up ok. However, I intend to do the install on a spare workshop machine with only 2G ram. Is that a problem?

Thanks for reading :-)

The best solution for working with disks is to use a liveCD (can be a USB key). This is a stand-alone version of Linux that runs entirely in RAM (and yes, 2G is plenty). Nothing gets written to disk - maybe swap if you already have a Linux system, but that can be disabled.
www.system-rescue-cd has all the tools you need, plus more.

All Linux distributions will have instructions for burning an iso file onto a USB/CD/DVD. Which is "best" will start another flame war - I suggest Mint with Mate desktop (GUI environment) for Windows converts. You'll get plenty of conflicting options.

syg00: Thanks for your response.

I've tried a few 'Live' installs but I found them either confusing or lacking substance, or both.

Which is why I decided to go for a full install of whichever distro might be most suitable for my needs.

I'm quite happy to load and boot into a Linux system to deal with a problem, as opposed to treating the Linux OS as only a temporary add-on.

Plus, I'm interested in learning more about Linux.

Who knows, I may end up using Linux as my main OS. But first I need to learn how to handle it.

So, which distro might be best for me at this point?

In which case you may have the same reaction to Linux installed - the liveCD is a working example of the distro in question. You can use the shipped package manager to install anything missing - once you connect to a network of course.

If you install to the suspect disk you may exacerbate the problems before ddrescue can do its work - hence the systemrescuecd.

Which part of the following was unclear ?

AntiX &/or MX Linux are very good options to get your teeth into, it's based on Debian.

Once you get past the basics, check out all the extras these distros can do for you.

What computer are you running this on? That will give everyone a clearer picture of what you need, 32 or 64bit?

syg00, fatmac, linus72: Thanks for your comments. I'll try and provide a bit more background.

Last week, a 16-month old 2TB SATA storage drive in my W7 main tower began misbehaving. Crystal Disk showed that it has bad sectors, uncorrectable errors.

I tried copying its data to another drive, but the failing drive would frequently disappear from Windows and wouldn't show again until a reboot.

After trying a few different apps without success, and doing some research, it seemed that using DDRescue in DOS might be the best way to go.

This is with the failing drive, and the target drive, slaved to the main system, cloning one to the other.

Only problem was, in DOS it's difficult to correctly identify the source and target drives. They show up in Clonezilla ok, but I don't want to use that app.

So I thought if I actually installed a Linux OS, I'd be able to use DDRescue with a GUI.

Regarding the computer I'll use, it's an old workshop machine, running W7 Ultimate 32 bit. Motherboard Asus P5GD1 Pro with 4 SATA ports, Intel P4 630 Prescott 90nm, 2GB DDR2 ram.SATA2 HDD 160GB.

But, now I've learnt more about Linux, I'd like to try it out more thoroughly. However, whichever distro I'll use will need to have access to DDRescue.

Yet another example of the xyproblem.

I don't know of the DOS version of ddrescue, but this ddrescue is what it says it is. A rescue tool - you'll need another (at least) 2T drive to rescue onto.
Are you trying to rescue your data or merely make the drive usable again without regard to possible data loss ?. If the latter maybe smartctl is more what you are looking for - you should be able to launch that from a GUI desktop file manager from any of the major Linux distros - certainly gnome-based ones.

As for which distro, 32-bit support is slowly being dropped - I used Fedora with a full gnome DE on a 1G P4 until about a year ago. Ran fine, although not as quick as modern kit. I would expect Fedora to maintain 32-bit support for the foreseeable future - but I haven't checked their policy.

As I said in my last post, though perhaps not clearly enough, the failing drive and the target drive will both be slaved into the host W7 system. Both drives are 2TB.
I'm not desperately concerned about data loss - que sera and all that - but I would like to try and recover as much data is possible. Seems to me this could take weeks, but the computer I'll use is isolated from my main network, and if I use the DDRescue log file, I can probably pick up where it left off, if it stops for any reason. If it fails completely, it's no BFD.

The XY Problem: Yeah, sounds like the ID Ten T problem.

I'd use 32bit AntiX running from a pendrive, with your two disks mounted in your W7 box.

Can't remember if ddrescue is in the download, but if it isn't, it's only an apt-get/ package manager call away. (AntiX is Debian based, so very reliable.)

Thanks, fatmac. While I was waiting, I loaded a DVD with Linux Mint plus Mate (32bit) and installed it on its own partition.
But when I was running the install, I noticed there was a menu option to load Mint alongside Windows - which I assume meant that the software would create a separate partition of its own accord.
Any thoughts on this?

Probably just means that they will set up grub, the boot loader, to give you the choice between it & MS, commonly known as dual booting, (most distro can do that).

I've never seen any indication that a GUI version of gnu_ddrescue or dd_rescue or gddrescue or whatever the names are on any given distro exists. There are two that are similarly named, from these upstream sources:
http://gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

My 630 is 64-bit, so yours probably is too. I stuck with 32-bit on 2GB PCs for several years, but when the writing showed up on the wall for 32-bit developing limitations as new software is developed that won't run on it without heroics, if at all, I migrated all that support it to 64.

I doubt any of the major distros lack one or the other in their standard repos. If you haven't already, check out distrowatch.com for assistance in choosing your distro, and probably more importantly, the WM or DE, which if you're like most people you'll be spending the most time using.