Jason's Notes

I found a neat Linux command line helper. PV : Pipe Viewer. It allows me to view the data throughput (ex MB/s), ETA, and progress bar when moving data through a pipe. For example I just used it when restoring hard drive image to a new physical disk.
pv -petr /backup/image.img | dd of=/dev/sda

In the attempt to restore data off a failing hard drive I use ddrescue to make raw copy of a hard disk. But I wanted to attempt to boot the system in a virtual box for a more simple data recovery. Because the VirtualBox GUI does not have the ability to make raw device mapping you must do it by VBoxManage command. I just open up a terminal, cd into my VirtualBox storage folder and run:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename my_raw_mapping.vmdk -rawdisk /path/to/backup.img

Now map the newly created vdmk file to your VM and off you go.