dealing with a slightly flaky USB drive; unkillable bash process

[Liam Proven]

On 1 October 2015 at 14:31, Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
> Are you saying I need to do
> ddrescue <options> /dev/sdc /dev/sdd path/to/logfile
> rather than
> ddrescue <options> /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd1 path/to/logfile
> (for example)?
>
> In other words, recover the whole drive rather than just the partition
> I'm interested in?  (I guess if the new drive is bigger than the old
> one, it just ends up with unused space after the partitions.)


Yes, that's exactly right. Then you should capture the whole encrypted
volume -- ddrescue will skip bad blocks and keep going.

Then, your only remaining problem -- potentially a big one -- is
getting any data back you can from the encrypted volume(s). It is
possible that many files will be unreadable or contain garbage, but at
least LUKS should stop failing on disk read errors. (It might stop and
fail on invalid data errors instead, but it's a step forward, at
least.)

(My $JOB-2, for a prominent North American Linux Vendor, required me
to use full-disk encryption on my work laptop, killing its performance
and making life a lot more difficult. As you might gather, I do not
like disk encryption!)

-- 
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