Re: NOOB, I don't know where to begin describing my problem / attempts at recovery.

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Randall,

Randall Meyer via Bug reports for ddrescue, data recovery tool. wrote:
> Anyhow, preliminaries out of the way, I have what I believe to be a failing drive on my 
> 6520, but I recently have taken the thing on-line, with one of the earliest and simplest 
> builds of Windows 10, and I FINALLY managed to turn off all the forced updates and forced 
> uploads. Luckily, I have a 128 Gb flashdrive with puppylinux on it (fossapup build) and I 
> can access the internet for advice while I try to assess the slow HDD (2.5" laptop 
> type: not big desktop 3.5" internal). But my point is, perhaps windows is corrupted, 
> by a virus or just regular internet-clog, and that's why it is slow? But perhaps it is 
> the drive. The SMART test was a bit inconclusive.

If the drive is just slow but does not give I/O errors, it may be better to 
just copy the files in it with 'cp -an', or even make a backup with tar or 
tarlz. Starting ddrescue or dd each day with shutdowns interleaved may 
easily end in disaster (overwritten source drive, for example).

Best regards,
Antonio.