Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Question about recovering data from a dying hard drive

[/sbin/Southen]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Tom Williams <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> So, a friend gave me a dying 500GB 2.5" SATA hard drive, with a Mac OS X
> HFS+ filesystem on it, to see if I could get the data off.  There are
> some family photos they need to recover.  So, I connected the drive to
> my Linux system, using my external hard drive enclosure, and used
> ddrescue 1.19 to recover what data it could. Throughout the recovery
> process, the drive made clicking and various other sounds, so I know the
> drive was close to death.  After about almost 9 days, ddrescue stopped
> and reported the 'input file disappeared'.  I interpreted that to mean
> the dying hard drive finally "gave up the ghost" and ddrescue couldn't
> read from it anymore.  This was during pass 2 or reading non-tried blocks.
>

Input file disappearing doesn't nessisarily mean it's dead-dead just
yet, it might have just been kicked off the bus due to errors.
Try powering it off and plugging it back after a bit, if it comes back
up you can resume running ddrescue and possibly get a bit more data
(assuming you created a proper logfile).


-- 
Sebastian Southen
Systems Administrator,
Murdoch IT Society