

dev/disk6/image_bad_drive.dmg /dev/disk6 is the destination drive and all of disk0 (disk zero) will get copied into a file called ‘image_bad_drive.dmg’ - The dmg file is created by virtue of the command, you don’t need to create it first. You need to understand what it does, and you need to understand some things about the machines it does those things to, in order to use it safely. Using ddrescue safely (from the manual)ĭdrescue is like any other power tool. With 16TB single drives on the horizon, either way you will need a second drive with at least the same amount of storage space for backup alone so please plan your storage needs accordingly. This raises another point, think carefully before purchasing those colossal 6, 8, 10 and now 12TB single drives. At this pace, if sustainable, it should complete in a few more days. In my particular case, ddrescue has been running dutifully for about a week and a half on a 2TB drive and so far 1.34TB has been recovered. For one, ddrescue can take a long time to recover a drive. These requirements should tell you something about how important it is to backup as regularly as possible. This is required because ddrescue creates a disk image of the entire affected drive and saves it to the destination drive. A second drive ( the destination drive) with the same or greater storage space than the affected drive.The affected drive ( the source drive), meaning the drive we need to recovery data from.The next step was recovering data that had not been picked up by Time Machine. The spinning beachball symptom was quickly isolated to an internal hard drive failing SMART. After restart, I ran disk utility from the recovery partition and there it was tatooed in the Disk Utility window, SMART status, failing. The symptom was singular, aggressive spinning beachball of death, also known as BBOD that appeared suddenty and persisted for about 15 minutes until I was finally able to restart. The Hitachi drive reports a SMART failure after a little less than a year in operation. The original 1TB hard drive that shipped with this iMac died about 1 year ago so a Hitachi 2TB rotational drive and an OWC SSD was added on without sacrificing the optical drive. I have an iMac 27-inch, Mid 2011, i7 3.4GHz computer with 32GB of RAM, two internal hard drives, an SSD for the OS and a rotational drive for my user account. I will go through the process as simply as I can.
Ddrescue gui tutorial mac#
This process will not fix your hard drive, it will only help you recover as much data as allowed onto another hard drive.įor the most part, the focus is on a recovery method that is triggered through a simple Terminal command and is a Mac centric article but the tool of choice, ddrescue, is available on multiple platforms. If you have a backup of the drive you don’t need to read on. The sole intention of this article is to help you recover data from a hard drive that is failing or has failed the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) status making the hard drive unreliable or even unmountable. This maximizes the amount of data that can be finally recovered from a failing drive.

Ddrescue manages efficiently the status of the rescue in progress and tries to rescue the good parts first, scheduling reads inside bad (or slow) areas for later.
