Continuing DDRESCUE; was destination *OVERWRITTEN* on 2nd stage?

[Arwen]

I ran this for a few days (dropped laptop, crashed hard drive):

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdc /home/Brian/desktop/rescue.log

I was running it overnight, as I needed my computer during the day. (I was swapping in the crashed hard drive at night, booting from a Live USB, and copying to a brand new drive plugged into a USB port.) The recovery had slowed to a crawl. I don't need everything, so I moved to the next phase:

sudo ddrescue -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdc /home/Brian/desktop/rescue.log

I got this message at startup:

Initial status (read from logfile)
Rescued 65620 MB , errsize 525 MB, errors 16515

Current status
Rescued 66387 ... (After 1 hour)

I was at around 435 GB before (of 500 possible) !!!
Did starting the second phase overwrite what was on my new drive???? Where did they get that "initial" 65620 MB number ???
If I totally screwed this up, what was the right code?

Thanks for you help.

[lcoughey]

It is not uncommon for the log file to get corrupt. You could generate a new log file with the following command:

>sudo ddrescue -G /dev/sda /dev/sdc /home/Brian/desktop/newlog.log

ddrescue will scan the clone drive only and will consider any blank sector as unread. So, assuming that the drive you are cloning to was blank when you started, this should get you most of the way back.

It would probably be better to just run ddrescue without the -n switch on the first time around, in my opinion.

[Arwen]

Thanks. I think I'm getting old. I had ran that first phase just over a year ago, and the drive has been in a drawer. I found my notes, and this isn't a map/log file problem.

I've ran into another problem, and I'm posting separately about it.