DDRescue - Dead Drive Saver

[Lazybones]

Better hope NTFS didn't decide to store anything important near the middle-end or end of the disk. I've seen NTFS put parts of the MTF and other housekeeping stuff near the end or middle-end of the disk.

NTFS stores a backup of the MTF and some meta data in the middle for redundancy and recovery reasons.. to my knowledge it is not possible to shrink a NTFS volume smaller than the location of this data.

[Melbosa]

Better hope NTFS didn't decide to store anything important near the middle-end or end of the disk. I've seen NTFS put parts of the MTF and other housekeeping stuff near the end or middle-end of the disk.

NTFS stores a backup of the MTF and some meta data in the middle for redundancy and recovery reasons.. to my knowledge it is not possible to shrink a NTFS volume smaller than the location of this data.

While to this process that may be correct, but in doing just a simply image over from one disk to another, I have successfully shrunk the partition size down to 10% of the data size.  The particular one I can think of was from a 1TB to a 160GB HD, and the resulting partition was able to shrink to 86GB, where the original was 680GB.  This was using Symantec Ghost 11.5.

[Tom]

Better hope NTFS didn't decide to store anything important near the middle-end or end of the disk. I've seen NTFS put parts of the MTF and other housekeeping stuff near the end or middle-end of the disk.

NTFS stores a backup of the MTF and some meta data in the middle for redundancy and recovery reasons.. to my knowledge it is not possible to shrink a NTFS volume smaller than the location of this data.

While to this process that may be correct, but in doing just a simply image over from one disk to another, I have successfully shrunk the partition size down to 10% of the data size.  The particular one I can think of was from a 1TB to a 160GB HD, and the resulting partition was able to shrink to 86GB, where the original was 680GB.  This was using Symantec Ghost 11.5.

If the tool is able to move all that, it should work fine. But ddrescue isn't that tool

[Lazybones]

NTFS stores a backup of the MTF and some meta data in the middle for redundancy and recovery reasons.. to my knowledge it is not possible to shrink a NTFS volume smaller than the location of this data.

While to this process that may be correct, but in doing just a simply image over from one disk to another, I have successfully shrunk the partition size down to 10% of the data size.  The particular one I can think of was from a 1TB to a 160GB HD, and the resulting partition was able to shrink to 86GB, where the original was 680GB.  This was using Symantec Ghost 11.5.

If the tool is able to move all that, it should work fine. But ddrescue isn't that tool
[/quote]

Ghost is filesystem aware, it can do that trick with SOME filesystems but it is limited by how new the version of Ghost is...

[Tom]

NTFS stores a backup of the MTF and some meta data in the middle for redundancy and recovery reasons.. to my knowledge it is not possible to shrink a NTFS volume smaller than the location of this data.

While to this process that may be correct, but in doing just a simply image over from one disk to another, I have successfully shrunk the partition size down to 10% of the data size.  The particular one I can think of was from a 1TB to a 160GB HD, and the resulting partition was able to shrink to 86GB, where the original was 680GB.  This was using Symantec Ghost 11.5.

If the tool is able to move all that, it should work fine. But ddrescue isn't that tool

Ghost is filesystem aware, it can do that trick with SOME filesystems but it is limited by how new the version of Ghost is...

Yeah, just like partimage and parted.

[Thorin]

Gah!  Broke Quotes!  Bro'Quotes!

Good luck, Mel

[Thorin]

Just gonna say, there's dd, and then there's dd_rescue which is the ddrescue package in Ubuntu, and then there's ddrescue which is the gddrescue package in Ubuntu.  Like so: https://askubuntu.com/a/211579