Transferring all data from a suspect HDD.

Peter Jason wrote:
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:33:38 -0500, Paul
wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:39:21 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , Peter Jason
wrote:

I notice the errant HDD is not recognized by
Macrium 7, so I can't try to clone it.
can it be seen otherwise?
Yes, in Disk Management & File Explorer. So I'll
buy the new disk & start transferring this very
day.
Do you have any info on the drive ?

https://i.postimg.cc/fbFckGnG/some-disk-info.gif

Even that little bit doesn't tell us very much.

Some of the utilities I'd like to use, are
too hard to get (Cygwin "disktype.exe" being
an example).

There has got to be some reason Macrium
cannot see it.

Paul

Thank you; I've shunted into panic mode (steels
the resolve) and connected a new 4TB HDD and the
data is being transferred as I type this. The
speed is woeful at between 6 & 50MB/sec. I'll
check things as soon as the contents have been
copied across.

I hope it's not too far gone.

Nobody really likes my gddrescue recipe :-)

*******

https://www.technibble.com/guide-usi...-recover-data/

ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /media/PNY_usb/rescue.logfile

That shows how you transfer from "bad" sda disk to "good" sdb disk.
I wouldn't put the logfile on a USB stick, in case of the
write pattern that would result. If the /tmp is relatively big
and RAM based, I might use /tmp/rescue.logfile as a place for
the logfile. If the power goes off, of course /tmp/rescue.logfile
would be lost.

On other distros, the syntax and options might look different

sudo apt install gddrescue

man ddrescue # look up the command options

sudo ddrescue ... /dev/sda /dev/sdb /tmp/rescue.logfile

It depends on whether a LiveCD has you running as root, or
it uses a regular user account plus "sudo" for elevation.

The benefit of ddrescue, is it makes a fast first pass and
gets most of the data on that first pass. Because it keeps
a "logfile", it keeps track of the "hard to get" stuff.
Repeated runs of the tool, with the tool reading in the
logfile and seeing what needs to be done, means the tool
focuses on the hard to get stuff on subsequent runs.

Eventually you reach a point where no additional data can
be read.

Using the information about which LBAs could not be copied,
you can (with "maths"), figure out which file or files
are corrupted and "not expected to live". Those are the
files you would then search in your backup collection,
to see if you have versions suitable for replacement.

Heavy damage to OS partitions will likely mean a Repair Install
of some sort. On Vista+, Repair Install is only possible if
the existing (damaged) OS will boot.

Paul