[olug] drive recovery

[Lou Duchez]

I don't know if this is of any help, but one thing I have done is buy a 
$30 drive duplicator from Amazon, and a blank drive with parameters 
comparable to the one that's going bad on me. IF the drive is still 
mostly readable - though that may not be the case in this situation - 
you can get a properly-working copy of your drive. Right now I'm running 
on a new hard drive in my workhorse laptop, that is a new physical hard 
drive that I cloned from the old drive (five years old and showing signs 
of pending failure).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09YY4TJZK

In terms of helping keep a drive going and correct errors, I've been 
using HDD Regenerator and it seems to be able to fix iffy sectors, copy 
data off sectors that are failing, and overall tell you about your drive 
health. You can also make a bootable varmint so you can check out 
multiple computers.

https://www.dposoft.net/

I don't know if that would help if you're click o' deathing, but, maybe?


On 3/21/2025 1:00 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Tim Larson <telrsn at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Anyone had good luck with a data recovery service? I’ve got a drive
>> with the Click O Death I need to salvage files from.
> What I have always done is copy the entire drive into a file with dd
> aka:
> 	dd if=/dev/bad-drive of=bad-drive.bin conv=noerror
>
> Compress my original backup so it doesn't take too much space
> 	gzip bad-drive.bin
>          
> Create a copy of the file
>
> 	zcat bad-drive.bin.gz > bad-drive.bin
>
> The fsck the copy
>
> 	fsck bad-drive.bin
>
> The loopback mount it (to get the files you want off)
>
> 	mount -o loop bad-drive.bin ~/tmp
>
> Usually by the time a drive dies my new drives have been significantly
> larger so it wasn't a problem.
>
> There is a newer utility ddrescue that deals with the annoying bits of
> damaged sectors, so I would definitely recommend starting with that.
>
> The important point from perspective is just creating a copy of the data
> onto another drive so you can get what is salvageable off, separately
> from dealing with the broken drive.
>
> Eric
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