ddrescue destination disc suddenly not working At 99.96% complete
by raeyning from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6DV95)
Hi,
I've been dealing with some external hard drive issues. The drive showed read errors on Windows, MacOS, and Linus (PopOS) and failed to mount on any. I tried using the built in repair on Win/Mac and neither could repair. (And, I now know that wasn't good to do as the write attempts could permanently damage the HDD). The most important stuff was backed up but I hoped to save some of the rest of it. At the advice of some helpful folks online, I've used ddrescue to try to save data from a failing 4TB external hard drive.
I purchased a new 18tb external HDD to use as the destination disc. It was formatted on MacOS using exFAT as it will be mostly used on that system (and MacOS is picky about formatting).
I ran ddrescue using the following command: sudo ddrescue -d -force /dev/sub /dev/sdc1 /home/username/Documents/ddrescue_log/clone.logfile (it was recommended not to use the -r3 command for the first pass to try to save as much data as possible before the drive dies).
It ran for about 13days. Did the first pass forwards rescuing as much data as possible, then did pass 2 backwards trying the non-tried" areas, then went into pass 3 forwards to attempt trimming". 99.96% has been rescued with 1208mb remaining as non-trimmed. There were multiple errors during the first and second passes but *no* bad sectors noted or marked at all.
I checked on it today and it had stopped. The error it gave is:
"Trimming failed blocks... (forward)
Unaligned read error. Is sector size correct?"
It looked like everything was fine as both drives were still showing up. I rebooted and tried again. This time the new 18tb destination disc couldn't be read at all. I powered both the computer and the drive down, rebooted and plugged in the 18tb HDD to power & the system. This time it was "seen" but the filesystem and contents are unrecognizable and it couldn't be mounted. I tried to run ddrescue again just to see what it said and it's still showing the exact same info from above including 99.96% of the data rescued. I plugged the 18tb HDD into MacOS and the results were similar - doesn't recognize filesystem or contents and can't mount. MacOS does show that the drive is completely full with no space (even though it obviously isn't since the total amount of data is about 4TB.
No idea what to do. Is my new drive bad? Is only ddrescue able to see" or recognize the data it's written on the drive? If not, why isn't it being recognized by the OSs? I've used Linux for awhile and I can follow directions but I'm no expert. Oddly enough, when I rebooted my Linux machine trying to start ddrescue again, it auto-mounted the 4TB drive (the failing" drive) without any issues and read the contents just fine (though of course, couldn't mount the 18th destination HDD as it's unreadable). Don't know what happened while running ddrescue but the problematic drive is currently readable.
What can I do at this point? Is there a way to resolve the ddrescue unaligned read error and finish the process? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! (If any additional info is needed, please let me know.)
I've been dealing with some external hard drive issues. The drive showed read errors on Windows, MacOS, and Linus (PopOS) and failed to mount on any. I tried using the built in repair on Win/Mac and neither could repair. (And, I now know that wasn't good to do as the write attempts could permanently damage the HDD). The most important stuff was backed up but I hoped to save some of the rest of it. At the advice of some helpful folks online, I've used ddrescue to try to save data from a failing 4TB external hard drive.
I purchased a new 18tb external HDD to use as the destination disc. It was formatted on MacOS using exFAT as it will be mostly used on that system (and MacOS is picky about formatting).
I ran ddrescue using the following command: sudo ddrescue -d -force /dev/sub /dev/sdc1 /home/username/Documents/ddrescue_log/clone.logfile (it was recommended not to use the -r3 command for the first pass to try to save as much data as possible before the drive dies).
It ran for about 13days. Did the first pass forwards rescuing as much data as possible, then did pass 2 backwards trying the non-tried" areas, then went into pass 3 forwards to attempt trimming". 99.96% has been rescued with 1208mb remaining as non-trimmed. There were multiple errors during the first and second passes but *no* bad sectors noted or marked at all.
I checked on it today and it had stopped. The error it gave is:
"Trimming failed blocks... (forward)
Unaligned read error. Is sector size correct?"
It looked like everything was fine as both drives were still showing up. I rebooted and tried again. This time the new 18tb destination disc couldn't be read at all. I powered both the computer and the drive down, rebooted and plugged in the 18tb HDD to power & the system. This time it was "seen" but the filesystem and contents are unrecognizable and it couldn't be mounted. I tried to run ddrescue again just to see what it said and it's still showing the exact same info from above including 99.96% of the data rescued. I plugged the 18tb HDD into MacOS and the results were similar - doesn't recognize filesystem or contents and can't mount. MacOS does show that the drive is completely full with no space (even though it obviously isn't since the total amount of data is about 4TB.
No idea what to do. Is my new drive bad? Is only ddrescue able to see" or recognize the data it's written on the drive? If not, why isn't it being recognized by the OSs? I've used Linux for awhile and I can follow directions but I'm no expert. Oddly enough, when I rebooted my Linux machine trying to start ddrescue again, it auto-mounted the 4TB drive (the failing" drive) without any issues and read the contents just fine (though of course, couldn't mount the 18th destination HDD as it's unreadable). Don't know what happened while running ddrescue but the problematic drive is currently readable.
What can I do at this point? Is there a way to resolve the ddrescue unaligned read error and finish the process? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! (If any additional info is needed, please let me know.)