Run sudo e2label to see your nice new label. $ sudo e2label /dev/sda3 rootdonthurtmeplz
You can do this for any filesystem, for example I could label the root filesystem this way: media/carla/100MB2 and /media/carla/50MB have labels instead of UUIDs like /media/carla/8c670f2e-dae3-4594-9063-07e2b36e609e because I always give my USB sticks descriptive filesystem labels. This shows that /dev/sda3 is my root filesystem, and everything in /media is external to my root filesystem. Gvfsd-fuse fuse.gvfsd-fuse 0 0 0 - /run/user/1000/gvfs Tmpfs tmpfs 7.7G 0 7.7G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup SOURCE FSTYPE SIZE USED AVAIL USE% TARGET If this doesn’t help you identify your drives then try findmnt: lsblk accurately identifies the Compact Flash drive, an SD card, and the optical drive (sr0, iHAS424 identifies a Lite-On optical drive). One has the root filesystem and my home directory, and the other is an extra data storage drive. Connect everything and then run lsblk:Īs this shows, it is possible to make mistakes. You want to make sure you have the correct device names. If you don’t have enough USB ports, a powered USB hub is a lovely thing to have.
#Ddrescue gui windows portable
I keep a spare SATA drive in a portable USB enclosure for storing the rescued data.Īnother way is to boot up the system that hosts the dying drive with your SystemRescueCD (or whatever rescue distro you prefer), and connect your rescue storage drive. I prefer bringing the sick device to my good reliable Linux system and not hassling with bootloaders and strange hardware. For SATA and SDD drives, USB adapters are inexpensive and easy to use. One way is to mount the sick drive on your Linux system, which is easy if it’s an optical disk or USB device.
There are a couple of ways to set this up. If you run out of room, even if it’s just a few bytes, GNU ddrescue will fail at the very end. You need a Linux system with GNU ddrescue (gddrescue on Ubuntu), the drive you are rescuing, and a device with an empty partition at least 1.5 times as large as the partition you are rescuing, so you have plenty of headroom.
GNU ddrescue is fast and reliable: it skips bad blocks and copies the good blocks, and then comes back to try copying the bad blocks, tracking their location with a simple logfile. dd-rescue is older, and the design of GNU ddrescue probably benefited from it.
#Ddrescue gui windows software
These days most Linux distributions have live bootable versions so you can use whatever you are comfortable with, provided you add GNU ddrescue and any other rescue software you need.ĭon’t confuse GNU ddrescue with dd-rescue by Kurt Garloff. (Remember the bad old days before USB devices? However did we survive?) SystemRescueCD has a small footprint and is specialized for rescue operations. I like to keep a SystemRescueCD handy, and also on a USB stick.
#Ddrescue gui windows mac os x
You can even copy Windows and Mac OS X storage devices because GNU ddrescue operates at the block level, rather than the filesystem level, so it doesn’t matter what filesystem is on the device.īefore you run any kind of file recovery or forensic tools on a damaged volume it is a best practice to first make a copy, and then operate on the copy. GNU ddrescue is the premium tool for copying dying hard drives, and any block device such as CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, Compact Flash, SD cards - anything that is recognized by your Linux system as /dev/ foo. The longer it takes to copy your data, the more you risk losing. When you rescue your data from a dying hard drive, time is of the essence.