Mastodawn

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?

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Hugo Mills 4d ago

@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.

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Hugo Mills

@vaurora It's been a while since I had to do this, so it's possible that I'm wrong about the tuning part, but I'm pretty sure there's options to change timeouts and retries.