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I got a couple of old disks I'm trying to copy over to a HDD. Some of the disks worked fine and I was able to copy them using just mount and rsync, however as is it with old disks, some of the disks were failing to mount. I tired using dd to make an image of them and then ran photorec to get the files out. This worked upto some extent. My files were recovered, however I noticed that dd was only copying about half (1.5Gb out of 4.7Gb) disks for some of the drives. This was causing photorec to only recover about half of the video on the disk (Is there some better way to recover these files from the disk?)

I was wondering if some unreadable section was encountered and dd just stopped copying, if so, is it possible to instruct dd to make a copy of the whole 4.7gb disk?

Command I ran: dd if=input of=output

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    4.7GB, so they're DVDs rather than CDs? Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 13:26
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    @roaima sorry I missed your comment, some of them are CDs while some are DVDs. Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 17:31

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Use ddrescue

  • (In Debian and Ubuntu: use aptto) install the package gddrescue.

  • Read a good tutorial via the command info ddrescue before starting to recover.

    • Clone to one drive and write a log file to another drive.
    • The first step is to use a fast process to clone what is easy to read.
    • Then a slow process can usually read a lot of what is difficult to read for standard tools.

  • Then on the cloned/recovered copy you can use several tools for recovery, for example PhotoRec, but also other tools for reading or converting from a DVD should work.

  • This way I have rescued video clips from really badly scratched DVDs.

ddrescue works well with any kind of damaged drive, HDD, memory card, USB pendrive, DVD or CD disk, also when there are some [physically] bad sectors.

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  • Hi, Thanks for the suggestion. I tired ddrescue and was going through the man page when I noticed that it says dvdisaster is better for CDs as it can read raw data. It has been running for almost 2.5 hours now and it says 89% is recoverable and is still going. Any idea how long does ddrescue usually take to rescue a 4.7gig disk? Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 16:21
  • @DentFuse, The time if the whole drive is easy to read would be the same for ddrescue as with other tools (so calculate from the previous rate). But when part of the drive is difficult to read (bad or 'almost' bad sectors), ddrescue works very slowly, and it is impossible to predict the remaining time until it cannot recover any more data. My most extreme case was when I recovered video from a marriage from two DVDs, it took more than 2 weeks totally. - So you need patience. Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 16:37
  • Thank you, one final question, when no more data recoverable, does the program point this out or does it keep going making no progress at all for an extented amount of time? Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 17:26
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    It exits (cleanly) Commented Oct 5, 2022 at 17:54

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