Dying disk, recovery suggestions?

[AbRASiON]

Anyone got real good experience recovering data?

I know about a few tricks over the years, I've dealt with a few dying drives, some unrecoverable some not.

Anyhow, thing is this drive is a weird one.
No reported bad sectors.
Spindle motor is totally fine, not ceased (so freezer trick is meaningless)
Drive isn't better when cold or hot.

Issue is the drive is reading at /literally/ .05kb/s in some sectors of the disk, it'll "I/O ERROR" in Ztree when copying some files. Others - it copies without a care in the world (slow as HELL!) but it'll copy them, no errors.

I dunno if it's mid sector remapping or what - chckdsk simply isn't an option. Takes long enough on a 3TB disk that's running 100MB/s - current speeds it just dies / drops out.
Any ideas? The data isn't SUPER SUPER important but I'm happy to leave it in a caddy running for weeks on end if some kind of tool can coax the data off.

Also - anyone seen this before? SUPER slow disk? What could it be?

 

[Grebuloner]

I've had this happen to a drive of mine. A WD Blue I was using as a backup in an external enclosure. Reformatting didn't work, assuming it completed the format at all. Turns out the enclosure corrupted the firmware of the drive.

My only suggestions (that won't cost you $$$) are to spend those several weeks copying off all the data and RMA or toss the drive as warranty dictates. Though if it's a Seagate under warranty, you may be able to convince them to try and save your data: my old 7200.11 with the 320 starts bug got free data recovery when I RMA'd it with a sob story.

 

[phis6]

I'd probably suggest you to image the drive using ddrescue in Linux. Then it would be much easier for you to recover the files you wanted from the image you got.

 

[AbRASiON]

That's the second ddrescue suggestion I've been given - tell me a couple of things though.
Can I JUST target one folder? About 15gb? Considering the speed of the disk, I just want to target one spot, the vast majority of the disk, I have backups of. (As I should!)

 

[omniscence]

No, ddrescue is a tool to make a block level image of a harddisk without retrying forever on unreadable sectors. You can do that directly to a new disk and run a chkdsk on it, but I suggest to never alter your original image until you complete your recovery. I generally do that to a filesystem that supports snapshots (i.e. ZFS) and do any recovery with virtual machines. You can also use something like GetDataBack on the image, but the image should be done first, just because the condition of the drive can get worse.