Ddrescue

[JamesWittel]

So question for you all. I’m an Ubuntu noob. Just starting to play with it.

I have an old USB drive that is dying. When I plug it in it just sits there Loading… in W10 I can see all the files just errors when I copy them.

When I run lsblk it brings up the drive as dev/sdb but when I run fdisk -l the search just hangs up while trying to read from the drive. In order to break it out of the cycle I have to remove the USB. In the same way when I try to ddresue the drive terminal just hangs.

Is this normal? Should I just wait? or should I try a different plan of attack?

[Hammerhead_Corvette]

I have an old USB drive that is dying. When I plug it in it just sits there Loading… in W10 I can see all the files just errors when I copy them.

…When I run lsblk it brings up the drive as dev/sdb but when I run fdisk -l the search just hangs up while trying to read from the drive. In order to break it out of the cycle I have to remove the USB.

Sorry I didn’t get this earlier, but have you tried to use Photorec to recover the files? from what you are describing, it looks like the partition table is corrupted. If so, it will be hard to recover file names fro your files. but you wcan recover the files. There are other tools for getting the data and some to repair the partition table but…in the meantime, try to use photorec and recover the files.

should be able to get the package of testdisk/photorec

From the documentation:

1. TestDisk can

   Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
   Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
   Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
   Fix FAT tables
   Rebuild NTFS boot sector
   Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
   Fix MFT using MFT mirror
   Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
   Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
   Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

2. PhotoRec ignores the file system; this way it works even if the file system is severely damaged.
   It can recover lost files from at least

   FAT
   NTFS
   exFAT
   ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem
   HFS+

It’s honestly one of the best tools for recovery I’ve used

[Adubs]

If the drive hangs like that, it’s dead.

ddrescue is hanging and not actually running. That drive is hooped.

[Mastic_Warrior]

Yeah. If dd cannot do anything with it, then there is not much hope. If you can open GParted and see the disk, you may be able to use the one touch partition table recovery option.

If you do have time to wait, give it an hour and see what happens. You could also just try dd and see if it will create a file.

dd if=/dev/sdb of=<file>.img bs=1024 status=progress