Cloning to a smaller hard drive with DDRescue
- by krebshack
I am currently working with a 700 GB Seagate hard drive that's beginning to fail. I'll call this "SDB" from now on. I'd like to clone it while I'm still able to.
However, the only hard drive that I have available is a 500 GB WD hard drive. I'll call this "SDC" from now on.
The partition scheme on SDB is as follows: 9.77 GB is allocated to a recovery partition and the remaining 688.87 GB is allocated to a Windows partition. Both are formatted using NTFS.
There is no partition scheme on SDC.
I know how to clone one hard drive to another using DDRescue but I've only done it using hard drives that are the same size. For your reference, I'll normally use the command "ddrescue -v -r 3 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc example.log".
I'd like to know if it's possible to do this with DDRescue. I've read the manual from GNU (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html) and I haven't seen anything indicating that it is possible.
I'm just looking for some confirmation that this is a correct impression. If it's not possible, then it would be helpful if any of y'all would be able to make some work around suggestions. But please don't feel obligated to do that. I don't want to have my one thread bogged down with two many questions.