Aloha! A customer brought in a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2TB USB3 external drive that he dropped at some point, and asked if I can extract any of the data from the drive (pictures of his kids). You can physically see where the corner of the case is a little dented where it hit the ground. But, no clicking sounds and the drive does spin up (I can feel slight vibrations that start when the drive is connected to a machine).
Connecting it to a Windows machine results in the "device connected" sound, followed by the "device disconnected" sound, and nothing shows up in disk management.
At this point I usually extract the drive from the enclosure and put it in my hard drive docking station. Unfortunately, this drive only has a USB3 connector. NO SATA connector inside the case. :-(
So, I connected it to my bench machine via USB3 cable and booted Parted Magic and ran ddrescue. Much to my surprise, ddrescue started recovering some of the data! The bad news is that the recovery was very slow:
====================================================
root@PartedMagic:/media/sdb2/Andy# ddrescue -d /dev/sdd1 andy.img andy.logfile
GNU ddrescue 1.20
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 34275 kB, errsize: 0 B, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 34275 kB, errors: 0, average rate: 31018 B/s
opos: 34275 kB, run time: 18m 25s, remaining time: 209d 21h
time since last successful read: 1s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)
====================================================
The value for remaining time fluctuates. At one point, it was over 1 year! I decided to interrupt ddrescue and seek some assistance. So, here are my questions:
1) Am I possibly damaging the disk by running ddrescue (considering that it will probably take several days)?
2) Is there anything I can do to speed up this data recovery?
Mahalo for your assistance!
Harry Z.
Connecting it to a Windows machine results in the "device connected" sound, followed by the "device disconnected" sound, and nothing shows up in disk management.
At this point I usually extract the drive from the enclosure and put it in my hard drive docking station. Unfortunately, this drive only has a USB3 connector. NO SATA connector inside the case. :-(
So, I connected it to my bench machine via USB3 cable and booted Parted Magic and ran ddrescue. Much to my surprise, ddrescue started recovering some of the data! The bad news is that the recovery was very slow:
====================================================
root@PartedMagic:/media/sdb2/Andy# ddrescue -d /dev/sdd1 andy.img andy.logfile
GNU ddrescue 1.20
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 34275 kB, errsize: 0 B, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 34275 kB, errors: 0, average rate: 31018 B/s
opos: 34275 kB, run time: 18m 25s, remaining time: 209d 21h
time since last successful read: 1s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)
====================================================
The value for remaining time fluctuates. At one point, it was over 1 year! I decided to interrupt ddrescue and seek some assistance. So, here are my questions:
1) Am I possibly damaging the disk by running ddrescue (considering that it will probably take several days)?
2) Is there anything I can do to speed up this data recovery?
Mahalo for your assistance!
Harry Z.