[mythtv-users] Hard drive failure -- recovery method suggestions

[Nicolas Krzywinski]

> Message: 8
> Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 09:47:54 -0400
> From: Jerry <mythtv at hambone.e4ward.com>
> To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Hard drive failure -- recovery method
> 	suggestions
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAO_Sck7bqfjhqO=BRu1mkOFiioU3NeVQbvJ=4jfmMio0MpY2Pw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Thanks Stephen and Simon.  ddrescue sounds good to me.  I do have the
> system partition on a separate SSD disk, so I will be able to install 
> it
> there and log without issue.  I also have an additional 3 TB hard 
> drive of
> the same brand in my closet at home.
>
> This is a recording drive and a videos drive.  I do have some home 
> videos
> on there, but I think that I have backups for those elsewhere, and I 
> have
> also given them to my sister and my mother.  Fortunately, nothing of 
> real
> value is at stake, but it will still take a while to recover any 
> shows that
> may be repeated in the future.
>
> I had heard that there might be issues with the Seagate 3 TB hard 
> drives
> but I went ahead and bought one anyway.  I got the second one at a 
> really
> good price as an insurance policy.  Now I am glad that I did.
>
> Hopefully it won't be too bad.  I haven't fully taken a look at the
> reports, but it looks like it failed a SMART health check and then 
> failed
> to read SMART data (something like that) and was then mounted as
> read-only.  I got several notices about 328 sectors failing, but of 
> course
> this number may have increased.  Again, it's hard for me to diagnose 
> now
> since I don't have physical access to the machine.
>
> Thanks again for your suggestions!
>
> Jerry
I once had a faulty hard drive that was fully usable after letting it 
cool down. It then worked for a few hours until it started failing 
again. This gave me the chance to get all the data from the drive in a 
few sessions. But it took several hours to let the drive cool down 
completely until it worked again. Because one may have other stuff to do 
than to sit beside a drive and watch it cooling, this was a several days 
procedure, of course ;-)

You wrote about failed sectors, ok, but I note another experience 
nevertheless: If there would have been only crc read errors, it may have 
been the cable only that suddenly stopped working correctly. But 
nowadays this may not be as likely as back in the dark age of IDE! :D

As the others recommended already to fully dump the faulty drive prior 
to making any data rescue actions, there is nothing more left to say, 
than: Good luck!

Nicolas