Ddrescue of SSD quickly recovers 0 bytes

Hardware Hub Storage
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1

I am trying to recover user data from a solid state drive that had Pop_OS (Ubuntu derivative) installed on it and won’t boot anymore.

I watched the Level1Tech video “Data Recovery Tutorial - Getting started with DDRescue and TestDisk”. I am booting the laptop using a Live USB of Pop_OS and trying to recover to a file on an external USB hard drive using ddrescue.

My drives are:

  • /dev/sda is the solid state drive I am attempting to recover
  • /dev/sdb is my bootable live flash drive
  • /dev/sdc is my external hard drive to back up to

Here’s my command output.

$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0    7:0    0   2.1G  1 loop /rofs
sda      8:0    0     0B  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   498M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0     4G  0 part 
├─sda3   8:3    0 457.3G  0 part 
└─sda4   8:4    0     4G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   1  14.8G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   1   2.4G  0 part /cdrom
├─sdb2   8:18   1     4M  0 part 
└─sdb3   8:19   1  12.4G  0 part /var/crash
                                 /var/log
sdc      8:32   0   4.5T  0 disk 
├─sdc1   8:33   0   128M  0 part 
└─sdc2   8:34   0   4.5T  0 part /media/pop-os/58B8-BBD8
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
zram0  252:0    0   7.6G  0 disk [SWAP]

Don’t miss “Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.” at the end.

$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 2.06 GiB, 2208002048 bytes, 4312504 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/sdb: 14.78 GiB, 15871246336 bytes, 30998528 sectors
Disk model:                 
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x31720e1b

Device     Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1  *          0  5064159  5064160  2.4G  0 Empty
/dev/sdb2           488     8679     8192    4M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sdb3       5066752 30998527 25931776 12.4G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/zram0: 7.63 GiB, 8193572864 bytes, 2000384 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sdc: 4.55 TiB, 5000981077504 bytes, 9767541167 sectors
Disk model: Basic           
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: B341B4D5-90FA-4DA7-8D26-647B8DD5B96D

Device      Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1      34     262177     262144  128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdc2  264192 9767540735 9767276544  4.5T Microsoft basic data

Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

$ ddrescue -d -r1 /dev/sda asus_recovery.raw asus_recovery.log
ddrescue: Can't open input file: Permission denied

sudo ddrescue finishes instantly.

$ sudo ddrescue -d -r1 /dev/sda asus_recovery.raw asus_recovery.log
GNU ddrescue 1.23
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
     ipos:        0 B, non-trimmed:        0 B,  current rate:       0 B/s
     opos:        0 B, non-scraped:        0 B,  average rate:       0 B/s
non-tried:        0 B,  bad-sector:        0 B,    error rate:       0 B/s
  rescued:        0 B,   bad areas:        0,        run time:          0s
pct rescued:    0.00%, read errors:        0,  remaining time:         n/a
                              time since last successful read:         n/a
Finished

If it would be helpful, I can reboot to get the error message from when it tries to boot.

What does this mean and where should I go from here?

2

If it’s an SSD garbage collection might have already trimmed it

3

This ate 30 TB of my data once. I picked the wrong drive to format for a Windows installation. The Windows 11 installer labeled drives by capacity only; I had to pick between a drive with 30720GB and 3072GB.

I later found out that the usual recovery methods for HDDs wouldn’t work; Windows trimmed the entire SSD. Sad times. :sob:

4

But how would I know? What are my options for a next step? If it was trimmed, how definitely does that mean the data is complexity gone?

I wasn’t doing any kind of maintenance when this became a problem. If I remember correctly, I just shutdown the computer, saw some error or warning as it was shutting down and then it wouldn’t boot again. If it’s like you’re suggesting, this sounds like a really good case to use a hard drive rather than a SSD (ok maybe that’s an over reaction) or at least do something different with trim settings.

5

For sure gone

Don’t know if it was trimmed though

6

How would I know if it was trimmed?

7

How would I know if this SSD was completely trimmed?

8

If the OS was on that drive, options are limited. If you have another drive, get that up and working then mount the problem SSD as a secondary drive and you should be able to search it.

journalctl | grep -i trim

Should find TRIM or trim events. If the logs themselves are gone, there’s no cheap way to pivot from that.

9

Yes the OS was on that drive but as shown above I am able to boot to a live Linux USB environment.

I created a folder to mount to:

sudo mkdir /mnt/pat

and tried to mount the partition that hopefully has the data I want

sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/pat/

The output is:

mount: /mnt/pat: can't read superblock on /dev/sda3.

What is this telling us?