Copy partitions in Linux / System Rescue CD data recovery

Open up a terminal session and type:

sudo lsblk

This displays the partitions of the hard drives on the system. Remember if booted off System Rescue Disk, the environment is booted and operating from RAM, not booted from the server hard drive partitions.

This will list a list of partitions and hard drives, they will appear as:

sda 500GB
sda1 20 MB
sda2 300MB
sda3 499.68 GB

(As an example). So SDA would be the physical hard drive, sda1, sda2 are probably boot/system partitions, and sda3 is probably a data partition, eg C: Drive, and because of it’s size would contain Windows/Windows Server, and data worth recovering eg documents, company data.

You may also see other partitions like :

sdb 3.7T
sdb1 128M
sdb2 3.7T

sdc 16G
sdc1 16G

Scenario is, the server hard drive is 500GB, the external USB drive is 4TB, and the system rescue disk is a bootable ISO on a 16TB usb thumb drive, created on RUFUS.

So, SDA is the internal server hard drive, SDB is the external hard drive (4 TB), and SDC is the bootable ISO on the 16GB USB drive.

First you have to mount the 4TB USB hard drive into the Linux file system:

cd /
mkdir media
cd /media
mkdir usb1
sudo mount /dev/sdb2 -t ntfs-3g -o permissions /media/sdb2

This mounts the USB drive, and creates a destination folder for the data recovery copy. There is switches there that set the permissions for copying etc.

Note which these are (eg, /dev/sda, /dev/sdb). Also note which device is the external backup drive (eg. /dev/sdd).

Use the System rescue disk GUI explorer to check the USB HDD is empty, remove and files and folders not needed, and to ensure there is enough space.

Now you can commence the copy of the physical disks in the server to the external USB hard drive.

Example:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda conv-sync,noerror bs=64K of=/media/usb1/disk1.img status=progress

The copy should commence and you can estimate the finishing time of the copy by amount copied and seconds taken (status=progress)

Disclaimer: MTC recommends this guide is just that, a guide and should be carried out by a professional, and your own commands may differ from the ones above in different scenarios. We accept no responsibility for any works completed by using this guide and is just for future reference.