On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 01:09:51PM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote: > There is light at the end of the tunnel which doesn't appear to be an > oncoming train ;/ > > This is a manually created transcript of what I've done this morning. > I physically can *NOT* do a copy-n-paste of what's happening as it is > currently in progress on a separate _intentionally isolated_ laptop. Broadly the transcript looks fine to me. > The rescue appears to be progressing. ddrescue has been running for 1/2 and > reports rescuing ~47GB without any _reported_ errors. That's unexpected as > the partition was the Windows C: drive and WinXP refused to boot. It's possible that WinXP has corrupted files, or a corrupted filesystem, on top of a perfectly fine drive. This can happen for any number of reasons, including unexpected power cuts whilst Win XP was applying an update of some sort and in the middle of writing a critical file. Whilst ddrescue is running, you could, if you wish, check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) logs, if you have smartctl (from the smartmontools package) installed. The command (as root/superuser) is smartctl -a /dev/sdc This *should* not have any impact whatsoever on the running ddrescue. The output is quite long so you may wish to pipe the above command to a pager (such as less) by appending "| less", and/or capture the output to another file (achieved at the same time by piping to 'tee' first, e.g. | tee -a some-output-file | less) The output might include lines such as the following (all taken from running the command on one of my HDDs): ... > === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === > SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED ... > SMART Error Log Version: 1 > No Errors Logged ... The output (in particular the "Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds") can be hard to interpret, which is why I suggested also saving to a file, but would tell you if the drive itself thinks it has suffered a failure. However if you are very risk-averse you are probably best leaving the machine entirely until ddrescue is complete. (definitely for another time: you can also instruct drives which support S.M.A.R.T. to perform one of a number of self-tests for problems using smartctl) > At the current rate I've another 2 hrs minimum. I'm not concerned about the > speed as both hard drive are on USB2 ports. It can take a very long time, especially once it gets to the later stages (scraping, trims, retries, etc.) I've been reading a single damaged DVD-r (capacity ~4GiB) for over a week and I'm not finished (I have interrupted the process however, as I am about to a different optical drive, which can be helpful when recovering from optical media but this is not relevant to HDDs or your situation) -- Jonathan Dowland Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.
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