I am using Linux KDE plasma and want to restore data (movie clips) from an external WD drive.
The laptop identifies the drive, light is flashing, but the content doesn't show.

Any suggestions?
Cheers

My first suggestion would be to post more details.

Which Linux OS are you using? Were any changes made just prior to the problem occurring? Have you successfully restored data from this drive previously? How old is the hard drive? What filesystem type is on the hard drive partition(s)? How do you try to view/access the data that 'doesn't show'? How is the drive identified? Shown with fdisk, parted or similar command or seen in a file manager window?

The external drive is WD some 6 years old and was used on a MAC laptop to copy video clips to it. Tried to see the content on that Mac and on my Linux KDE plasma the latest version but no luck, the hardware does NOT detect it inserted into the USB port, not even with another USB cable.

When I plug it in, the light on the HD flickers until it stops. When looking in Partition Manager it shows Smart Status BAD withe the details in the following attached images in a PDF.

Thanks for any help

Attached Files

WD_HD_Failure.pdf (88.9 KB, 15 views)

If you cannot see the data from either the Mac or your Linux and were able to do that previously, I would think it is bad/failing hardware. The pdf you attached doesn't make it look good although I'm not really familiar enough with it to say definitively. I don't know why it shows all the N/A. Does it show in the BIOS?

From your .pdf I rather think the disk has passed the "backup all data" warning.
indicates the disk is bad, normally there are a couple of spare cylinders or so (No of platters x No of sectors) on a hard disk which are used to hold data from sectors marked as bad. 2841 is pretty big.
indicates to me that the spare cylinder which accommodates the re-vectoring of faulty sectors is pretty much full and there are at least 4 bad sectors which can no longer be re-vectored.

i.e. The disk is toast!

Not very helpful I'm afraid.

Play Bonny!

I agree for the most part with what other responders have written. The pdf indicates a hefty number of bad sectors, more than I recall ever seeing on one disk what wasn't WD. WD Green disks I've had all croaked before or shortly after their warranties expired.

One possible issue hasn't been touched. Are you certain the Linux kernel you are running supports the filesystem on that disk? Do you have any other devices formatted on MacOS that your kernel can access successfully?

I'd like to see output from smartctl -a copied and pasted here.

How old is your kernel? What distro? What Plasma version? What filesystem is on that WD?

I don't think this is going to show anything different. the OP states that the disk can't be accessed with either his Mac or Linux distro, The filesystem isn't the problem.

The system which handles the bad blocks/sectors is held within firmware on the hard disk itself, nothing to do with the operating system. To all intents and purposes the operating system sees a completely fault free hard disk. Even "new" hard disks (the spinning rust kind) have bad blocks (well, they did in my day!) their location was kept in a bad block file on the disk, The file contained pointers to the good blocks within the spare cylinder. Yup. I know blocks and sectors are different things, each sector having so many blocks of data. I've always just known it as a bad block file.

The question I'd ask is whether the OP's disk was dropped or received some sort of sharp blow as the number of bad sectors looks like a pretty severe head crash to me. More likely as it's an external drive.

I'm kind of new with solid state drives but I'd reckon there may be something similar to deal with faulty cells within an SSD memory array.

Anyway...my

Play Bonny!

Restore data?

Back in my days we found the backup discs and restored wanted/needed data to working disc.


Nowadays it seems using backups have changed to rescue, repair and despear.

How times have changed.



Sorry! but I'm having a bad day!