How To Install gddrescue on Kali Linux

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install gddrescue on Kali Linux.

What is gddrescue

gddrescue is:

The gddrescue tool copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.

gddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps.

The basic operation of gddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of gddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

Automatic merging of backups: If you have two or more damaged copies of a file, cdrom, etc, and run gddrescue on all of them, one at a time, with the same output file, you will probably obtain a complete and error-free file. This is so because the probability of having damaged areas at the same places on different input files is very low. Using the logfile, only the needed blocks are read from the second and successive copies.

The logfile is periodically saved to disc. So in case of a crash you can resume the rescue with little recopying. Also, the same logfile can be used for multiple commands that copy different areas of the file, and for multiple recovery attempts over different subsets.

gddrescue aligns its I/O buffer to the sector size so that it can be used to read from raw devices. For efficiency reasons, also aligns it to the memory page size if page size is a multiple of sector size.

Please note that this is the GNU ddrescue version providing the ddrescue executable. The package is named gddrescue because the ddrescue version of Kurt Garloff used to have the ddrescue package name already.

There are three methods to install gddrescue on Kali Linux. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install gddrescue Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install gddrescue

Install gddrescue Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install gddrescue

Install gddrescue Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude on Kali Linux first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Kali Linux. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install gddrescue using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install gddrescue

How To Uninstall gddrescue on Kali Linux

To uninstall only the gddrescue package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove gddrescue

Uninstall gddrescue And Its Dependencies

To uninstall gddrescue and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Kali Linux, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove gddrescue

Remove gddrescue Configurations and Data

To remove gddrescue configuration and data from Kali Linux we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge gddrescue

Remove gddrescue configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove gddrescue configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge gddrescue

Dependencies

gddrescue have the following dependencies:

• libc6
• libgcc1

References

• gddrescue website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install gddrescue package on Kali Linux using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.