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

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 19 Apr 2015 18:19:04 +0100, you wrote:

>On 17/04/15 10:31, Jerry wrote:
>> My question is, what tools are recommended for recovery?  I have a
>> feeling that a lot of the files are trashed due to the speed of the
>> failure of the drive.  Would testdisk be an option?
>
>I found out that testdisk is quite useless for that task when it comes
>to big media files. Firstly you'll end up with files named
>f1234567890.mpg or similar. If these files have no meta data stored in
>them you need to look at all of them to figure out what's in them.
>
>Secondly the files may contain errors from non-recoverable sectors. You
>will only find out once you watch them in full and then your movie night
>ends in an disaster when the video skips somewhere in the middle. I
>don't know whether there are tools which can scan the files for such errors.
>
>When I had this problem in the past I finally decided to delete the
>whole lot and set everything to rerecord and ripped all my DVD's again.
>
>Thomas

Yes, one of the advantages of ddrescue is that its logs tell you which
files were recovered without problems, which ones had retries but were
recovered OK, and which ones had unrecoverable sectors.