I could use some advice.
I've read https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364229/recover-deleted-luks-partition and Broken /boot partition: input/output error (+more) and i really want to attempt the laste one, but first my situation.
Yesterday i was about to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu, figured: lets check my disks. Noticed 753 bad sectors: so step 2: lets make some backups. Shutdown my pc (that has been powered on for years), put in a new SSD, boot the thing: and beng: my main disk failed. It shows the partitions, but they are all of type 'unknown'. Only thing i can do from the disk util is reformat. And the LUKS label is gone too. It does however show the correct sizes for the partitions. (If i only used an USB stick to make backups before the shutdown ... well good lesson for next time).
It's probably an Ubuntu 18 installed disk (maybe even a bit older), so the layout is LUKS: small 537MB fat32 boot, a 768MB etx4, and then the LUKS disk 999 GB containing the main LVM partition. It's a Samsung 860 Evo 1TB SSD and i think i even updated it to GPT, but not 100% sure.
Now when i checked last (before i shut it down again) i noticed disk util showing only 1 bad sector (?) that's a lot down from 753. And this is what i'm worried about / why i decided to post this question.
Is the best way forward in situations to run fsck and hope for the best, or is it time for the recovery professionals to take a look at this? I already tried to see what testdisk came up with and it didn't. Could not find the partition tables or anything and a lot of unable to read.
So before i do any more damage to it, i could use some advice: what is the best way forward with these types of recoveries? Did a lot of them back in the good old days with the classic types, but this is my first SSD-recovery, so here it goes.
Thanks! (ps any other posts i missed that describe situations like this: please direct me to these, i have searched and visited the suggested questions while typing this, but there are so many - probably missed them. I found some that are close, but never a 100% match to my situation - long time powered on, lots of bad sectors and then only 1 bad sector after shutdown and no partition tables)
Followup:
@guiverc 1. Apologies. The system is not running Ubuntu 18, but Ubuntu 20.04, it was installed with Ubuntu 18 and then upgraded to 20.04.
@guiverc 2. The system is now running with a fresh disk, the broken disk has been removed, totally follow what your say. All other hardware behaves fine, it's the disk, so no luck.
@David DE - I agreed with that before i posted this, recover what i can and dump the drive, clearly. The point is: with this weird changes in reporting of bad sectors i am unsure what the best next step is. I tried to access the disk 1 last time, the partition table worked for like a minute, i was able to unlock it, but mount did not work. Then it went back in to I/O errors and the drive reported 1 MB total size, so game over. I guess it's time for a professional recovery firm.
Thank you both for confirming. I was hoping on good news and a route to fix the partition table (so i can attempt to salvage some files), but after more reading on the behaviour of SSD drives in such cases and your comments it's clear to me this disk is done and the chance any software is able to recover anything are slim at best.
