Very Important!  The command illustrated above requires that you make sure that the drive you are copying to is as large or larger than the drive you are copying from!

When run like this, there is no preparation needed to the new drive.  No partitioning, no formating, nothing. Basically, I cut open the box to a brand new Western Digital hard drive and plugged it in.

I did have to go into bios and tell Bios that there would be a new hard drive on the second SATA port.

I will admit that I did run dd_rescue a number of times till I got a run that I was happy with.  Two times forward (without the -r option) before I tried running it in reverse.  In reverse I had my lowest error count of 22 errors which I felt that was low enough that it might be worth the effort to go and take a look at the new hard drive.

In my case, all the lower partitions were ok on the old drive.  I only needed a good copy of /dev/sdb7 partition. (or as good a copy as I could get)  That was the primary reason I went for a reverse order copy.