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?
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
Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦
mhoye
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