Re: How to Recover Dissertation writing Files from Storage device?
On the second thought, usage is not too complicated. Biggest concern is to identify devices properly and not to overwrite wrong disk or stick.
- boot from rescue CD
- connect your preciousss to USB port
- connect empty disk/stick to another USB port, same size would be preferred
- use sginfo /dev/sda (then sdb, sdc etc) to read device information - that helps to identify them
- use command dmesg ¦ grep sd ¦ more to see what devices and partitions were detected
- if your preciousss was found as /dev/sdb, dmesg may report some partitions on it, like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdb4
- in addition, ls /dev/sd* shows all disks/partitions that are present
- less -f /dev/sdb then gives a peek at the raw data on sdb (if it's readable at all). q for quitting the viewer.
- and now for the dangerous part. It is absolutely necessary to know which device is which. Double-check, triple-check, make no assumptions here.
- ddrescue /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 will clone a first partition on sdb to a first partition on sdc. Obviously overwriting sdc1. May warn about the dangers and ask for --force parameter.
- ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc will clone the whole device. This is quite OK for harddisks and SSDs, but not always healthy for USB sticks - some of them may keep secret areas in their logical block address space and do not like overwriting them. Heavily depends on the make and firmware.