Yesterday I noticed that one of my drives was acting up, it responded very slowly. It isn’t my main drive and there was very little data on there, so I wasn’t immediately worried, but I did copy some of the most important data to a different drive, just in case. I saved 2 folders and was copying a third, and that was when it stopped responding entirely.
I ran lsblk and it listed the device (/dev/sda), but no partitions (used to be sda1) and also no available space on the drive. That was when I figured I was in trouble and shut off the pc. I haven’t turned it back on yet, will probably disconnect it physically first.
There is still some data on there that I would like to recover, but it’s not really worth paying for professional recovery. Is there anything I can do? Even if it’s a single-shot rescue mission and I trash the drive afterwards.
Is it a HDD or an SSD/NVME?
It’s usually a very bad sign if all of a sudden you can’t see partitions anymore on the drive.
Basically, if you manage to boot and the drive gets properly recognized, you can either try to copy stuff off of it using standard methods. Or you can try some more advanced tools, e.g. ddrescue.
Sometimes you can get lucky, and it’s just a loose connection.
It is an HDD and it’s about 10 years old, so I’m assuming the worst. I don’t know much about failure modes of hard drives, whether it would be mechanical, electrical, magnetism gone stale…
Anyway, I’ll disconnect it for now, order a fresh drive and try to ddrescue the image to that. Seems doable at least.