On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, RD wrote:
Everything I read about ddrescue seems to imply trying to recover whole
partitions. Can I also use it to recover single files from an otherwise good
NTFS partition?
Sort of.
Can I mount the NTFS partition and "ddrescue /mnt/ntfs/my_mail_file logfile"?
I understand the file may be not be laid out in one piece on the disk and may
be fragmented.
Well, that's the question: can you mount the NTFS partition? If you can,
then yes you can use ddrescue on a single file.
But if you can't mount the NTFS partition, you will need to copy the
entire thing somewhere else where you can run repair tools on it.
In other words, I guess my real question is: does ddrescue copy disk blocks
one after the other, or when given a file, does it just ask the filesystem
module/driver/whatever to return the relevant blocks which it can read?
Both actually. Normally it's run on a physical device, and it just copies
blocks one after the other.
But if you run it on a file it will still copy blocks one after the other
- only in this case the OS/filesystem will redirect each block to it's
actual location on the disk. (This is what a FS normally does.) But that
requires a functioning filesystem.
-Ariel
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