Rescue Failing Drives With SystemRescue

“When a hard drive, CD/DVD, USB stick, or any digital storage
media is on its way to the Great Bitbucket in the Sky, GNU ddrescue
is my favorite data recovery tool. GNU ddrescue is included in the
default SystemRescue image. Before we dive into the fun stuff,
there is some vexing naming confusion to clear up. There are two
ddrescue programs in SystemRescue. GNU ddrescue, by Antonio Diaz,
is the one I prefer. The version on the current SystemRescue
release is ddrescue 1.14. There is also a dd_rescue, version 1.23,
by Kurt Garloff. dd_rescue is nice, but it’s slower than ddrescue
and doesn’t include as many features.

Just to keep it interesting, Debian Linux adds its own bizarre
naming conventions. The Debian package name for GNU ddrescue is
gddrescue, and the package name for dd_rescue is ddrescue. But the
binary for gddrescue is /sbin/ddrescue, and the binary for
dd_rescue is /bin/dd_rescue. Fortunately, SystemRescue doesn’t mess
with the original binary names, and calls them /usr/bin/ddrescue
and /bin/dd_rescue.

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