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Failing drive question

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Anonymous
2013-01-06
2013-04-05
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous - 2013-01-06

    Hey everyone-

    I have a feeling I'm SOL, but I'm hoping someone here might be able to help me.

    I have a 1TB WD Black Drive that's failing. I have no delusions about saving the drive, but I'm trying to get the data off of it before it goes.

    Unlike most failed drives, this one does not seem to be clicking, so I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with it. However, it's incredibly slow to read from, and I'm not sure if I'm able to write to it - if it's failing, what's the point?

    I picked up another 1TB WD Black last night, and this morning I started a ddrescue operation on the failing drive, hoping to clone the drive before it goes completely. However, I'm slowly losing hope that this is a feasible salvage attempt.

    ddrescue actually seems to be working well - after an hour, I'm sitting at 28MB saved, with no errors reported. However, that's the problem - it's an hour for 28MB - my average speed is just over 5k/s. At this rate, it's going to take a year to clone the drive.

    For clarification, the exact command used in ddrescue was the following:
    ddrescue -v -r3 -f /dev/sdb /dev/sdc clonelog.log

    Part of the problem is that the drive really seems to be failing. While ddrescue is running, i'm getting the following messages:

    ata19.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
    ata19.00: failed command: READ DMA
    ata19.00: cmd c8/00:00:00:df:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 131072 in
    res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
    ata19.00: status { DRDY }
    ata19: hard resetting link
    ata19: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
    ata19.00: configured for UDMA/33
    ata19.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
    ata19: EH complete

    This then repeats intermittently between ddrescue updates. So my question is:

    What I'm really after is a specific set of data on the drive - specifically some photos. There's about 150 GB of them, estimated, and that's all I care about retrieving. If I could only copy that data off, that'd reduce the amount of time required by about 85%, which is huge. Is there any way to do that? I think the drive itself is about 600Gb full, so possibly making an image file might be a better way to go, but I have no experience in dealing with image files, and would have no idea what to do with it after I finished.

    Is there any way to help the drive at all? Doing google searches, I've seen people suggest a variety of things, but I'm really not sure what I should be looking at doing, or how to do it. I'm only about an hour into DDRescue at this point in time, so I'd rather restart it now, rather than wait for it to get further in.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

     
  • Fuchs

    Fuchs - 2013-01-07

    Try to make a backup of important data to an external drive (SD card, USB stick or HDD)

    Use
    memtest86+  # in 'clonzilla live' too

    Next start
    systemrescuecd-x86-3.0.0.iso CD
    startx
    Midori WebBrowser  # have a look at www.systemrescuecd
    gparted  # for a look
    testdisk

     

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