Can you DD a drive that wont mount
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So I have an external USB drive that is configured of Mac OS Extended (journaled) and It's unable to be mounted, on Mac, Windows or a Kubuntu laptop we have here.
I'm curious if I can copy the drive contents before I dig further into this, even though the drive doesn't mount.
No, no backups (wasn't planned for ever) was meant for 1 time medium to be saved to the servers.
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Have you already tried connecting to the Mac that was able to mount it?
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@black3dynamite said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
Have you already tried connecting to the Mac that was able to mount it?
Yes, and nothing, doing a fsck there are issues with the superblock.
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@dustinb3403 said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
@black3dynamite said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
Have you already tried connecting to the Mac that was able to mount it?
Yes, and nothing, doing a fsck there are issues with the superblock.
Maybe restarting the Mac while usb plugged might fix it.
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If you are only cloning the drive, it doesn't need to be mounted.
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@black3dynamite said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
If you are only cloning the drive, it doesn't need to be mounted.
I'm wanting to clone the drive, but only used space. It's a 1TB drive, and I really don't want to record blank space.
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DD does not need the drive mounted. But what keeps it from mounting might stop DD, too.
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Yes, you can
It will copy the hard drive sector by sector so it will record the blank space 
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Sure, you can bring Dunkin Donuts to any type of drive you like. Don't forget the coffee...
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@dbeato said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
Yes, you can
It will copy the hard drive sector by sector so it will record the blank space Yeah that is what I figured. Not a deal breaker, just will take longer to do.
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@scottalanmiller said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
DD does not need the drive mounted. But what keeps it from mounting might stop DD, too.
Yeah I assumed this, but figured it might be worth a try.
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Scott Moulton from myhardrivedied.com has a lot of awesome free hard drive recovery videos. I think some of the free software he recommends are mhdd, Victoria, and ftk imager. Do a quick search on YouTube.
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@dustinb3403 said in Can you DD a drive that wont mount:
I'm curious if I can copy the drive contents before I dig further into this, even though the drive doesn't mount.
Checked PartedMagic and the tools that comes with it.
like others said you mount file system, however if you want to do sector by sector copy that does not involve file system layer. think clonezilla and its options to dumb clone (sector by sector )or smart clone (detecting file system and only copy used space.)Forensics do this prior to have an original copy of the victim machine.
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You can also check dd_rescue
