Any SMART disk experts? I have a failing external USB drive (spinning rust kind) that I'm trying to get the data off. It has quite a lot of bad sectors that fail the CRC check. The read is going very slowly due to the retries on bad sectors and I'm currently estimating 1-2 weeks to read the whole thing.
Is there a way to make this go faster, such as tuning the number of retries so it gives up faster on the bad sectors?
@vaurora I'd make a mirror image of the drive first, with ddrescue. You can tune the retries with that. Then, once you've got as much of the disk imaged as you can, mount the image with loopback.
Also saves on additional wear on the original device.
@vaurora @jameshubbard no, just no.
Spin rite is quackery
https://www.disktuna.com/and-now-im-done-with-steve-gibson-and-spinrite/
gnu ddrescue gives you a set of tunables that do what you describe but for whatever my advice is worth, my first step in a data-recovery/forensic context is to swap out the USB controller for an internal connector and desktop power supply, if at all possible. USB-HDD drive connectors are notoriously unreliable and often the root of the problem. Once ddrescue finishes, or gets close to finishing, doing filesystem recovery on the image is much easier.
https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html
@vaurora You probably want to get that drive out of the USB enclosure and directly onto a SATA port of a computer. The USB->SATA adapter is 'handling' errors upstream from where your operating system can see them.
I'd get the drive into a PC and 'dd' it to a file first, then mount the image with loopback and read-only and retrieve the files from that disk image. The less the damaged disk is used, the better, and one fell swoop to grab an image is the cleanest exit on that front.
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