Any SMART disk experts?

[vaurora@mstdn.social]

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?

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@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.

[xabean@infosec.exchange]

@vaurora generally consumer drives don't let you tune TLER (time limited error recovery), so chances are slim sadly.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@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.

[jameshubbard@twit.social]

@vaurora you might try SpinRite. It supposedly will do a low level read and potentially get the drive to state where you can read it. I've had some luck in the past with it.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[mhoye@cosocial.ca]

@vaurora

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.

403 Forbidden

(www.gnu.org)

[tychotithonus@infosec.exchange]

@mhoye @vaurora +5 for ddrescue, AKA gddrescue. Saved my bacon more than once - and a brilliant, elegant piece of software design. (Avoid Spinrite - it was useful on MFM/RLL drives, but is largely snakeoil on modern drives.)

[trademark@fosstodon.org]

@vaurora hddsuperclone used to be proprietary, but is now free. It can among other things talk directly to the disk, bypassing the OS so it has a better chance to liberate your data.

[feld@friedcheese.us]

@vaurora what tool are you using to read it with? some are designed for this scenario by changing the size or reads, forward vs backward reads on the failing sectors, etc