command line
"df"

Also, you probably do not want to use the whole disk as output for photorec. Us the partition as shown.

Why not?

Hey I just ran "sudo badblocks -v" on the failing drive and it resulted in 20 bad blocks. How much would that be in MiB/GiB you think?

Also, I tried to set Ubuntu not to write to those bad sectors using "sudo fsck -l badsectors.txt /dev/sdb" but e2fsck is giving me errors:

What does that mean?

fsck cannot be safely run on a device in use. In other words, the file system must not be mounted. Additionally, it can only be used on a device that has a partition and formatted file system since it runs at the file system level. badblocks runs at the hardware device level.

20 bad blocks is not a significant quantity, space wise, but any device that exhibits bad blocks will likely continue to get worse and realistically should be retired soonest.

I suggest you read the man pages for badblocks and for e2fsck since it is possible for e2fsck to actually do a badblock scan with the appropriate options and mark the sectors as unusable. I don't know how that works for a btrfs system, but don't recall that you are using btrfs.

Here ScatteredThunder, we are at 48 posts and still, I gather, no substantive effort has been made to recover the disk. In case you didn't notice, I unsubscribed from this thread because it was going nowhere fast, and you were all questions but were taking no real action. The guys here are being very patient.

I can understand that if this is your first time round with linux disk recovery and you're being careful. You can't recover anything without known good storage space. Re-stitching together output from photorec is hard going indeed. I advise against it unless you absolutely need that data. How many days would you spend on recovering it? I'll tell you how this is going to end:

1. You're going to give the drive to professionals, and pay money. They will get some stuff.
2. You're going to buy extra storage, and take the best advice offered. If the disk is still mountable, rsync may be a good option for restoring things. I don't hold out much real hope with the 'dd' approach. In theory - yes; In practice, no.
3. You're going to accept that you've lost your data. Put it down to experience.

You subscribed to this thread?

I am not a Linux expert, and this is my first attempt at data recovery.

Sure the guys here are being patient, did I ever complain about anything?

Fortunately, if recovery unsuccessful I won't be losing sensitive data. The moment I saw bad blocks in that drive I immediately started moving storage around.

But I will continue trying to recover data from that drive so I can learn, if anything this serves as experience.

Again, thanks to computersavvy and michaelk. You have been helpful!