Hi there,

I have an hdd (platter, not ssd) that got put into read-only state suddenly. After a restart (which I probably shouldn't have done), the drive is shown as containing no partitions. I tried testdisk to find the partition but to no avail. So, I guess I can't use that to recover files to another disk, right?

smartctl shows the drives' information (type and such) but when it comes to smart data these all fail with "input/output error".

I have a spare drive available, so I wondered if it would help to use ddrescue to clone the drive and then to work with the image. I actually started it as a test and let it run for a while, but it showed thousands of read errors in its output.

So, any suggestions what I could try to get that "lost" partition back or access its files to recover them as a whole or selectively would be greatly appreciated.
Tia.

Hello, mrokii & welcome to LQ.

99.999% chance your drive is dud.Going on the information you give, it just may be an electronic failure rather than a platter failure.

I had success in the past restoring a Seagate drive replacing the pcb by buying new from the manufacturer. But they were only 15 miles away and electronics and indeed costs were different then. It might be worth a shot.

That aside, the more you mess with it, the worse it gets and the more you waste time. I keep a usb backup disk. Get one.

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Seems you've done the sensible things, but ddrescue is more robust than almost anything else you can get FOSS - if it's not processing the disk, it looks like a lost cause.

It might succeed in spite of read errors if you give it enough time. A better estimation could follow from us seeing the output from when you tried. Don't get your hopes up too high though.

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Yeah... don't waste time. Just get a new platter, restore your backup to it and - Voila!


Or are you saying you don't do backups?

I had a house fire in April, 2016 where I lost my computer, my in-house backup drives, and my wife's Windows computer which was not backed up. All of these had both smoke and heat damage. I still had my off-site backup in my detached garage. The insurance company paid to have all of the damaged items sent to a data recovery company whose contact information I have lost. They recovered all of my wife's files.

The data recovery company recovered substantial parts of each of my hard drives to where I had every file at least twice although some of the recovered copies were up to a month old. Combining those with my garage backups which were 2 days old and 9 days old, I recovered everything up to the date of the fire.

The point of all this is that if your lost data is valuable enough then it may be worth your while to pay a data recovery company to try to recover your files.

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Step 0: dd the complete drive to a file on a healthy drive with sufficient space, and work on that copy, NOT the physical drive itself.

testdisk/photorec can do MUCH more than find files on partitions.
Please read their wiki, it's not exactly intuitive to use.

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For the price of one (1) data recovery service, you can...

- buy a usb/esata docking station

- buy 3 nice 2TB (my preferred size, ymmv) bulk drives

- get a very nice holiday with family for weeks


Morale? HDDs are ridiculously cheap. When you buy one, do get two.

mrokii,

It all depends on how valuable the data is to you.
Can you simply write it off and make backups in the future or is it vital for it to be recovered?

Before you dig yourself a deeper hole, I would advise finding a reputable, professional data recovery company which has very positive customer feedback such as Essential Data Recovery:

http://www.essentialdatarecovery.co.uk/

http://www.essentialdatarecovery.co....de_drives.html

There are so many charlatans in this line of work, so do proceed carefully.

Thanks, that's an interesting take, but replacing the pcb is beyond my capabilities.

Usually I would say, yes, I do backups. But life during Covid is difficult and my mind has been on a lot of other things than doing a backup. So yeah, the last backup was from about three years ago.

I've given up for the moment, might try it again in a few days. But losing so much data (last backup is years old, tbh) has drained my energy further down. Can't bring myself to try that again now, with so little chance of success.

I get what you mean, but that is out of the picture for me at the moment, due to Covid-related money constraints.

Thanks for the advice. Some of the lost data hurts, but in the end it's not life-threatening or existential to have it back. And I don't have the money at the moment for recovery-services. Thanks for the suggestions though.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look.