<p dir="ltr"><br>
On Jun 28, 2014 2:36 PM, "Roger Heflin" <<a href="mailto:rogerheflin@gmail.com">rogerheflin@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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> Don't be sure it is not bad sectors.<br>
><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">As the OP I can provide some information about the failure mechanism. There are squeaks and clicks coming from the drive periodically, so I think it is a mechanical failure. There are bad sectors, but they could be a result of the mechanical failures. I'm not too worried about the loss, it is one of three mythtv drives and I consider all the recorded TV to be expendable. As for the brand it is a seagate and it is within warranty. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I have had good luck recovering needed data using ddrescue in the past, but it really isn't worth the time to run that on a 3 TB drive, so I was looking to maybe pull a few shows and movies off of it before it quit responding altogether. Using mythlink worked great, and I have managed to salvage about 20GB of recordings so far. </p>
<p dir="ltr">The way I did it was to run mythlink, pointing the link destination to a new folder. Then I sorted the links in Thunar so that I could delete all the ones not pointing to the failing drive. Then I deleted the links I didn't care about trying to save. After culling, I used 'cp -RL /path-to-symlinks/ /destination-path/', to copy the actual file. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I have had to unplug and replug several time to get the drive to continue to work. On each retry I just delete the symlinks of the sucessful copies. I also had to delete some files created by some of the failed copy attempts.</p>
<p dir="ltr"> I have tried putting the drive in the freezer to cool it down quickly after it quit responding. I will say though, after reading Raymonds post, I think I will avoid that in the future and just let it air cool for longer. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Thanks all for the advice.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Jeremy<br></p>