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I have a Seagate Freeagent external hard drive. While I was backing it up on Windows XP my pc crashed and I received the horrifying "Delayed Write Error" when I rebooted citing "$MFT" and a few other files. I tried to unmount it, but to no avail. Now my pc just crashes when I try to access it via Windows.

In Ubuntu I am able to view it through disk utility. SMART status is "DISK FAILURE IMMINENT". Fdisk doesn't work, and the SMART tests fail on "Reallocated Sector Count".

Is there any way for me to rescue any of my data. I can still access the drive but as soon as I do that it crashes.

backitup
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3 Answers3

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Your approach to use ddrescue is a good one. If the problem is caused by defects on platters surface, you should be able to rescue at least the un-damaged areas. Running ddrescue multiple times on the same output file will add new "rescued" data to that file - after some time you'll recover the most of what can be recovered. I'm sure you already read general overview and the the manual

If ddrescue fails immediately without recovering any data, regardless of which area of the drive you're trying to access, it suggests a failure of electronic components rather than the platters. What I would do in this case:

  • let the drive to rest. I used to have a drive which was starting to produce errors a few minutes after powered up; the longer it rested - the longer it worked. I left it "in a cool dry place" for a few months which allowed me to take a full snapshot without any errors - it worked several hours!.

  • take the drive out of enclosure and plug it directly via SATA. Just in case.

  • if you have another drive of the same model you can try swapping the electronic parts from the healthy drive - this is sorta risky as you can ruin both drives but I heard of people doing this with good results.

There are also some forensic methods using million-dollar equipment... but it depends on how valuable the data is.

Sergey
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Can't seem to log back in as "backitup", witness the noobness.

I did solve the problem. ddrescue is now in my mind the single greatest backup and recovery tool the world currently possesses. I must add, that on my work machine I received many errors during backup. When I took it home, it worked like a dream, a 14 hour dream but a dream nonetheless.

Bought a new internal, mounted the .iso file, et viola.

backitup
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have you try photorec? If you can mount it, maybe...

feligiotti
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