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Retrieving Data Off Failing Drive

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Revert64

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Jul 31, 2010
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I have a drive that I can pull several files off at a time, but it will drop off the OS after a short period of time. Whats the best way I can pull some more things off without causing further damage?
 
Here's a quick and dirty list.

If you are booting from the failing drive, STOP.

Use a fast booting HDD or CD instead.

Quickly copy files to a USB drive or whatever you have.

Sometimes freezing a drive helps. Seal it WELL in a freezer safe ziplock bag.

Try to copy in short spurts. If the failure is predictable, such as in 5 minutes, stop when you know failure is imminent and start over again.

Good luck, I'm sure others here have tips...
 
Revert64 said:
I have a drive that I can pull several files off at a time, but it will drop off the OS after a short period of time. Whats the best way I can pull some more things off without causing further damage?
Click to expand...

ddrescue (available on sysrescuecd or similar livecd / usb stick) to a same size or larger drive. ddrescue will make a bit for bit copy skipping around sectors that it can not read. then after all good data is copied it will go back and try the bad sectors. There is a log file so that when the process has to be terminated it can resume. So in this case if a drive becomes totally unreadable you can stop ddrescue pull the power on the drive then put the power back on the drive and then continue with ddrescue. The only word of caution is to make absolutly certian what drive is the source and what drive is the destiation. Like other similar linux utilities ddrescue does not care if you made a mistake and reversed the source and destination. It will be quite happy with writing 0s over your good data making it useless. One way to verify your drives is using

Code: 
fdisk -l /dev/sd?

A second way is using smartctl or hdparm to show the drives serial # model #

Code: 
smartctl --all /dev/sda

Code: 
hdparm -I /dev/sda

Remember that modern linux distributions devices should most likely be

/dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc ...
 
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