How to Install and Use Myrescue on Kali Linux (Step-by-Step)

If you’ve already tried a few data recovery tools and none of them managed to pull anything useful from your drive, Myrescue is one of those tools that’s worth giving a shot. It’s a small, lightweight utility, but surprisingly good at reading whatever is still recoverable from failing hard drives, old CDs or DVDs, and even flash storage that’s started acting up.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through what Myrescue actually does, the basic idea behind how it works, and how you can install and run it on Kali Linux without much hassle.

And if you prefer running tools like this inside a clean, stable environment instead of your main system, Eldernode’s Linux VPS plans can come in handy.

How Myrescue Works

Myrescue doesn’t try to clone your whole disk in a straight line. Instead, it reads the drive in small chunks and keeps a little “map” of which parts were good, bad, or worth retrying.

If it hits a badly damaged area, it doesn’t get stuck Myrescue simply jumps ahead, grabs whatever clean data it can, and comes back later to give the bad spots another try.

It’s basically “save the healthy data first, fight with the damaged parts afterward,” which is why it often works better on dying drives than a normal copy tool.

How to Install Myrescue on Kali Linux

There isn’t much you need to do to get Myrescue running on Kali. The tool is already in the default repo, so installation is basically one quick command. Open your terminal and type:

sudo apt install myrescue

That’s really it. Kali grabs the package and drops the binaries into place.

If you want to double-check that everything installed correctly, just run:

myrescue –help

If the help text shows up, Myrescue is ready to use.

How to Run Myrescue on Kali Linux

Once Myrescue is installed, you can start trying out its tools right away. Everything runs in the terminal, and the commands begin to make sense pretty quickly once you use them a couple of times.

1. Using the Main Myrescue Command

The main program is simply myrescue. You can run it with different options depending on what you’re trying to recover, but if you just want to see what switches are available, run:

myrescue --help

It’s a quick way to see all the available options so you have a clear idea of what you can do before starting an actual recovery.

2. Viewing the Bitmap (myrescue-bitmap2ppm)

Myrescue keeps a bitmap file while it works — basically a map of which blocks were good, bad, or unreadable.

If you want to turn that bitmap into an actual image (which is surprisingly helpful), you can check how to use the converter by running:

myrescue-bitmap2ppm -h

The help section makes it clear how to pass your .map file in and turn it into a .ppm image.

3. Checking Recovery Stats (myrescue-stat)

If you want to take a closer look at how the recovery actually went what was copied, what failed, and everything in between you can check the stats tool by opening its manual page:

man myrescue-stat

It gives you a breakdown of everything Myrescue logged during the process.

A Simple Example From Real Use

A while ago I had a drive that was behaving strangely sometimes it would mount, sometimes it froze the whole system as soon as I tried to open a folder. It still showed up as /dev/sdb, so at least the system could “see” it, but reading anything from it was a gamble.

Instead of fighting with it, I tried imaging the whole thing before it died completely. The Myrescue command I used looked like this:

sudo myrescue /dev/sdb recovered.img -b recovery.map

Nothing complicated was going on I was basically telling Myrescue:

“Take this dying drive, save whatever chunks you can into this file, and keep a small note of what happens as you go.”

As it ran, I could literally see it racing through some parts of the disk and then slowing down to a crawl or skipping ahead entirely when it hit damaged spots. It didn’t feel perfect, but it was at least doing something, which is more than I could say for a normal cp or dd.

When it finally wrapped up, I had:

an image file that actually opened

a map file showing which parts of the disk were toast

and enough data recovered to pull the few things that mattered

It didn’t save everything, but for a drive that was minutes away from giving up, it did better than I expected.

Troubleshooting Myrescue on Kali Linux

Myrescue is pretty reliable, but when you’re dealing with a dying disk, things don’t always go smoothly.

Here are a few issues you might actually run into the kind that don’t usually show up in the official docs but happen all the time in real use.

1. “Device is busy”

This is one of the most common ones.

It usually means the system decided to auto-mount the drive before you did.

What I normally do is:

sudo umount /dev/sdb

If it still refuses:

sudo fuser -k /dev/sdb

After that, Myrescue typically stops complaining.

2. Myrescue gets painfully slow or seems stuck

If the progress suddenly drops to a crawl, it’s usually hitting a nasty batch of bad sectors.

It’s not broken it’s just wrestling with the damage.

Most of the time, you have two choices:

let it run (yes, sometimes for hours)

or stop it and restart using the same mapfile so it doesn’t redo the healthy parts

Jump mode also helps when the disk is in really bad shape.

3. “Permission denied”

This one sounds obvious, but it happens more often than you’d expect.

Either the destination path isn’t writable or the command simply wasn’t run with root privileges.

Running the whole thing under root usually fixes it:

sudo su

Then rerun your command from that shell.

4. The recovered image won’t mount

This is incredibly common, so don’t panic.

A damaged source disk often means a partially damaged filesystem.

Try mounting the image read-only:

sudo mount -o ro,loop recovered.img /mnt/recovered

If that fails:

don’t run fsck on the image (it can make things worse)

instead, try using file-carving tools to extract whatever survived

Conclusion

Recovering data from a damaged drive is rarely a smooth process, but Myrescue gives you a decent shot at saving whatever is still readable. Throughout this guide, we walked through how it works on Kali Linux and how its extra tools can help you see what’s actually happening during the recovery attempt.

If you want to explore more recovery workflows or prefer working in a clean and stable environment instead of your own machine, running these tools on a Linux VPS can make the whole process simpler. Eldernode has a few options that fit well for this kind of setup.