I have a hard drive with a ddrescue copy of a drive that has since failed (physical problem). On the drive is a 70Mb EXT4 partition and a ~700Gb LVM partition. The challenge is to open up the LVM partition and reliably access it contents. The good news is I have no reason to think it’s encrypted unless that happened by default.
See this thread for the story so far. (Ignore the “can’t boot live OS” discussion - problem resolved).
Restating what are, I hope, the major points: the original drive has 512B physical and logical sectors, the new drive has 512B logical sectors but 4096B physical sectors. This mismatch may mean the ddrescue -f /dev/sda /dev/sdb session produced a useless copy. Maybe not?
The original drive was working well until just after the ddrescue attempts started. Try #1 accidentally put the output in /tmp and, no surprise, eventually filled the device. I deleted the unwanted image and, after try #2, which produced the present situation, rebooting failed when fsck couldn’t handle a problem in /tmp.
In the course of connecting and disconnecting drives, the SATA data connector failed on the original drive.
Robin_listas has been working with me on this issue. The problem has drifted so far from the original topic that I’m opening a new thread, directed to a new problem.
Again, the challenge is to open up an LVM partition and reliably access it contents. For extra points, try making the HDD bootable.