Lately my hard-drive have failed me. I'm trying to rescue some important data from it and right now im stuck doing this… I've read about ddrescue data recovery tool and it seems like it's doing its job but… I think that I'll have to wait indefinitely.
This is information that I got from SMART: http://pastebin.com/yz0ew8zT before trying to rescue any data.
The hard-drive is only visible in bios and from linux distro's – I can't mount it tho.
In this file: http://pastebin.com/xAZj7NBU I provide the current status of invoking
ddrescue -d /dev/sdd2 partition.img partition.logfile
There are also information that I got from reading logfile…
The problem is that this information is like 6hrs old… and time since last successful read: 7 hr… I don't know if I should let it keep running or not… I want only some data. I don't care about recovering everything from this partition.
I just want to ddrescue finish its job and provide me with .img file that I can mount and explore to recover my data. What should I do? Wait? Try some other options when using ddrescue?
EDIT
In the end I canceled ddrescue because I thought that it recovered enough data. I could let it run but I think that it would end in like one week or so… anyway I will describe my steps after cancelling it.
First command that I need to run was (if I wouldn't do this I would get some nasty errors and not be able to mount the image):
sudo ntfsfix partition.img
Then just mount the image file:
mount -o loop,ro partition.img mountpoint/
And then I was happy to recover my files!
Best Answer
You could try changing the HDD mainboard with an exact replacement... the disk platters may be OK but if the board isn't controlling the disk or processing the data correctly then this may be why DDRescure is taking forever...
Another solution may be a professional data recovery specialist... the prices can be astronomical, however.
You could also try TestDisk and PhotoRec by CGSecurity.
Ultimately, if no tools work, you may have to take it as a lesson learned and to always make sure you have backups of your most critical data...