Sick Computer

[Tom]

Ususally for me, the failures were mechanical in nature, so it was only slow arround the failed bits. It sounds like his whole entire disk is being slow.. Which makes it sound like the controller board on the drive is acting up some how. like its retrying every command once or twice...

[Thorin]

0.5MB/sec, 14GB recovered in 7.5 hours.  2GB/hr.  At this rate, it won't be overnight, it'll be 14 days for 700GB of data.

I have read that NTFS disks cause slowdowns in ddrescue, but not why.  And yes, this is from an NTFS disk to an NTFS disk, of course.

[Lazybones]

0.5MB/sec, 14GB recovered in 7.5 hours.  2GB/hr.  At this rate, it won't be overnight, it'll be 14 days for 700GB of data.

I have read that NTFS disks cause slowdowns in ddrescue, but not why.  And yes, this is from an NTFS disk to an NTFS disk, of course.

When doing recoveries I normally only target critical folders and files not the entire drive.. However in your case you have a drive full of media you want to recover so it is a lot more than I normally would go after.

[Mr. Analog]

Be thankful that you can rescue anything at all!

[Melbosa]

Based on your description of your drive, I'd say a week is not so a bad thing if you get your data back?  I've done recoveries spanning almost 3 weeks, depending on size and damage of the drive.  IMO, if you are out a computer for a week, but get all your data back, I'd say live with the loss for a week.  Glad you are at least getting something back.

[Thorin]

Yeah, that's probably the right attitude.  I just didn't think it'd take that long, I guess.

ddrescue apparently has problems and severe slowdowns copying from NTFS to NTFS, so I stopped it and tried formatting the destination drive as ext2, then tried to restore the NTFS partition to an image file on the destination drive.  Took me a long time to figure out how to get ddrescue to actually create the image file, and then it was going even slower.

So I'm back at imaging the entire drive from one to the other <sigh>  Should've just left it going, but we'll mark that up to a lesson learned.  Now it's going at 0.3MB/sec, so 1GB/hr.  29 days for full recovery!

Who knows, Tom, maybe you're right and it's just a controller board.  www.deadharddrive.com has an interesting story about that.  But I'm at a point now where I don't want to interrupt the process at all, because it might never finish otherwise.

[Mr. Analog]

Y'know when I did my last deep recovery I restarted the job 3 times trying to make it faster but in the end if I had just let it run it's original course it would have taken half the time

[Thorin]

lol, yeah, I'm learning / have learned that lesson now, Mr. A...

[Mr. Analog]

lol, yeah, I'm learning / have learned that lesson now, Mr. A...

S'cool, I think it's one thing that everyone who does a drive recovery goes through that question of how long will it take vs how long will this drive last haha

[Lazybones]

lol, yeah, I'm learning / have learned that lesson now, Mr. A...

S'cool, I think it's one thing that everyone who does a drive recovery goes through that question of how long will it take vs how long will this drive last haha

This is why most of my recoveries only target a small set of critical files. Going after it all does no good if it burns up in the first half of the transfer.

[Tom]

lol, yeah, I'm learning / have learned that lesson now, Mr. A...

S'cool, I think it's one thing that everyone who does a drive recovery goes through that question of how long will it take vs how long will this drive last haha

This is why most of my recoveries only target a small set of critical files. Going after it all does no good if it burns up in the first half of the transfer.

Hard to do that when you don't really know what's wrong. The file system could already be broken, which means a full copy is necessary. Of course that isn't the case here..

[Lazybones]

There are several companies that make recovery utilities that can do a raw read even when the filesystem is very damaged, however at that point files files often don't have names an you have to search by type and size.

[Mr. Analog]

There are several companies that make recovery utilities that can do a raw read even when the filesystem is very damaged, however at that point files files often don't have names an you have to search by type and size.

This is what I had to do last time, i believe i wrote it up in the Tech subforum somewhere.

[Tom]

I've used imagerec/jpegrec before. Worked rather well. But it may not support all file formats you may want to save.

[Mr. Analog]

I've used imagerec/jpegrec before. Worked rather well. But it may not support all file formats you may want to save.

The tool i used flattened all my PSD files, so while I got some of them back most of them were unusable