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After booting my computer one day, my computer routed me to the "grub rescue" shell. All the settings there seemed fine. I booted ubuntu from my usb drive to try to get to my ubuntu partition on my hard drive. I could get into some folders but trying to get into my home folder gave me an "Input/Output error".

Not able to access my files through usb drive ubuntu, I use the grub2 shell and I was able to access my files with the "cat" command and read them. Is there any way to transfer all my files from my hard drive to an external storage device?

PS: I have some very important files that I haven't backed up on my ubuntu partition of my hard drive.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: My smartctl checkup on the hard drive said that the health status is OK.

Vishal Muthuraja
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1 Answers1

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DDRescue can make an image of the damaged hdd despite reading errors

In case of complete hardware failure, there is nothing to do else of an hardware intervention. In many cases, the electronic board of the hard-drive is failing, disks and other mechanical parts are ok. So, if you can find an identical drive, you can switch pcbs and have the hdd running again... But that is a bit tricky.

The software solution will be to make an image of the damaged hdd despite reading errors. DDRescue was made for this.
Once booted from USB Live Ubuntu, simply install -to ram- the required software, plug-in another external media and save on it an image of the failing hdd.
You have two options:
- Text mode with gddrescue package
- Graphical mode with ddrescue-gui package

1/ Graphical mode

ddrescue-gui

# Graphical Mode:
# Boot with live usb
# Install DDRescue graphical
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hamishmb/myppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ddrescue-gui

2/ Text mode

# Text mode:
# Boot with live usb
# Install gddrescue
sudo apt install gddrescue

Official documentation:
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html

Find some howtos on how to use ddrescue:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iiyREu4-wI
- https://www.technibble.com/guide-using-ddrescue-recover-data/

cmak.fr
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