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

[Tom Williams]

On 10/27/2014 08:59 PM, /sbin/Southen wrote:
> 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).
>
>

Thanks for the tip!  I ended up returning the drive, to the owner, so I
can't try this.   However, I had a similar experience where I used
ddrescue to copy a 320GB SATA hard drive image to a 1TB SATA hard
drive.  During this process, ddrescue encountered no errors but when I
tried to mount the image file it created, I couldn't.  When I used
ddrescue to copy the image file to the 1TB hard drive, I was able to
access the data on the 1TB hard drive without problem.

Anyway,

Thanks for the tip!

Peace...

Tom

-- 
/When we dance, you have a way with me,
Stay with me... Sway with me.../