Yesterday I noticed that one of my drives was acting up, it responded very slowly. It isn’t my main drive and there was very little data on there, so I wasn’t immediately worried, but I did copy some of the most important data to a different drive, just in case. I saved 2 folders and was copying a third, and that was when it stopped responding entirely.

I ran lsblk and it listed the device (/dev/sda), but no partitions (used to be sda1) and also no available space on the drive. That was when I figured I was in trouble and shut off the pc. I haven’t turned it back on yet, will probably disconnect it physically first.

There is still some data on there that I would like to recover, but it’s not really worth paying for professional recovery. Is there anything I can do? Even if it’s a single-shot rescue mission and I trash the drive afterwards.

  • ChojinDSL@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    19 hours ago

    Is it a HDD or an SSD/NVME?

    It’s usually a very bad sign if all of a sudden you can’t see partitions anymore on the drive.

    Basically, if you manage to boot and the drive gets properly recognized, you can either try to copy stuff off of it using standard methods. Or you can try some more advanced tools, e.g. ddrescue.

    Sometimes you can get lucky, and it’s just a loose connection.

    • Hoimo@ani.socialOP
      1·
      14 hours ago

      It is an HDD and it’s about 10 years old, so I’m assuming the worst. I don’t know much about failure modes of hard drives, whether it would be mechanical, electrical, magnetism gone stale…

      Anyway, I’ll disconnect it for now, order a fresh drive and try to ddrescue the image to that. Seems doable at least.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    The Arch Wiki has a comprehensive article on Data rescue: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_recovery

    And there’s more in the Ubuntu Wiki: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

    What I do is run ddrescue and scrape all I can get from the disk. Into an image file on another disk. Then I’ll unplug the broken disk. If that’s enough data, I’ll run testdisk to recreate the partition tables, extract files… And if that fails, we have software like photorec.

    Not sure if ddrescue is able to do anything in your case. Sometimes a harddisk will just fail entirely and there’s nothing to be done, except swap controllers or other broken components in a clean room.

    • Hoimo@ani.socialOP
      2·
      14 hours ago

      Thanks, that gives me some options at least, even though there’s little hope. It went from plenty fast and healthy two days ago to basically dead yesterday, without much warning. At least as far as I could tell.

      I see these articles talk about “failing”, but what state would that have been? Should I have seen the signs and prepared? (Though I think “prepare” would’ve been the standard advice of backups, second drive, second location.)

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        HDDs have plenty failure modes. You might get SMART warnings. Or maybe you don’t and fails a bit more spontaneously. I had harddisks do that nasty clicking sound because something’s wrong with the heads. And sometimes I could still read data from the other areas of the disk. Sometimes it would refuse to read anything. And sometimes a HDD just works and the next moment it won’t spin up again, or the controller is dead.

        I think the only reliable method is backups.