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.