My Ubuntu 16.04 system started going into emergency mode, typically as I was just digging out my external drive to actually backup data. The errors I was getting were I/O errors on sda http://imgur.com/R6imc71. I found the partition recovery link on another post on here and found almost identical errors in there where it suggested running hdparm --read-sector to confirm the bad sector number, then --write-sector to zero it. This seemed to work ok with the bad sectors running 2056-2062. Restarting then put me back in emergency mode and checking journalctl -xb gives me errors on sda1 culminating in a message set of something like the following (these are the current errors, but they suggested the same solution, ref below), all referencing /dev/sda

I did this and it came up with a whole list of things which I said yes to fixing, but the list went on and on so eventually I aborted it.

Any suggestions on how to proceed? Is fsck likely to do more harm than good? Is there a bootable recovery distro that might be more constructive, or at least let me try to grab my data?

I'm sure the drive is ext4 and it's my data drive so my OS drive seems ok (they're separate physical devices)

Thanks - MH

Assuming the system is sound I'd think that almost any live media could get your data.

I get the feeling that maybe you should take the disk to a different system maybe? No clear way to proceed. We haven't proven any part good or bad yet. Ram, cpu power supply cables or drive could be suspect at this point or even motherboard.

Others may have some ideas.

i think the most important thing is to

1. switch off the machine and/or stop mounting the drive in question in read/write mode, immediately
2. take a deep breath
3. gather resources (i.e. RTFM, on- and offline) and think up a strategy about how to assess the state of the drive
4. consider taking a full copy (yes, that might mean you need to go out and buy another drive - bonus: from now on, you can use the newly purchased drive for backups)
5. maybe try to fix the old one

and oh, did i say it already: take backups!