[ale] HDD Locked Up - Wife business pics in it!

[DJ-Pfulio]

I'm with Steve and Sam here.

IMHO,

The only things you should be doing with the failing disk is using
ddrescue to clone it at the device level.  /dev/sdZ  you can store that
onto another disk or into a file on a disk that's huge.  It will take a
long time and try multiple times to recover the data, but it will grab
most of it on the first attempt with just the bad sectors needing
multiple attempts.

sudo ddrescue /dev/sdZ  /media/path/to/HUGE/sdZ.file  /tmp/log

AFTER you get a clone, then you can send logical data recovery after it.

I have to say this ... having daily, automatic, versioned, backups means
stuff like this is a minor inconvenience.  photorec isn't exactly user
friendly.  It will find all sorts of files on the disk, multiple
versions, and you'll end up with tens or more of each file. Which is the
current version?  Say you have 10,000 files ... each with multiple
versions.  It won't be fun.

As for the SMART data, I'd need to see the full output to read it. The
raw data is the most important, but need all the columns.  "Old-age"
gets set BEFORE you open the disk up.  Picked up an 8TB a few weeks ago,
to be used for backups, and ran smartctl. Some of the attributes were
already marked as "old-age" with less than 10 minutes of spin time.

On 12/13/19 9:28 PM, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Dec 2019 12:30:59 -0500
> Sergio Chaves via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> I was then able to see the drive.
>> The dd command says "error reading /dev/sdb : Input/Output error"
> 
> Use ddrescue. Unlike dd, ddrescue is meant to read files or devices
> with bad sectors. Be sure to use the log file.
> 
> I once got a music CD at a garage sale. It was all scratched up and
> wouldn't play on any CD player, standalone or in a PC. I used ddrescue
> on it. It took hours, but I was able to get it sounding just like new,
> except in one short stretch.
>