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.
HDDs have plenty failure modes. You might get SMART warnings. Or maybe you don’t and fails a bit more spontaneously. I had harddisks do that nasty clicking sound because something’s wrong with the heads. And sometimes I could still read data from the other areas of the disk. Sometimes it would refuse to read anything. And sometimes a HDD just works and the next moment it won’t spin up again, or the controller is dead.
I think the only reliable method is backups.