Tim: >> There is a "ddrescue" tool with that kind of thing in mind.
home user > Having looked at the man page, I couldn't make sense of how I should use > these for this situation. See if this page is any different from what you've read, then try discussing things with people here: https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html I don't think I've ever used *it*, though. I do remember using some recovery tools, long ago, for some drive that Windows mangled. The problem with data recovery is that often you can only get partial remains from each file. Which may be good enough for recovering important bits of some text, but not for direct use of existing files. If you want to attempt to recover from a drive failure (of any kind), it's important that all subsequent accesses are read-only. Don't let anything write anything to the drive, that includes new meta data about when files were accessed. There's different approaches to recovering data from a drive with drive failures as opposed to the computer stuffing it up. If the drive is failing, then repeatedly trying to read it until you recover something is a common approach, bearing in mind that doing *that* can cause worsening of the failure. If you're recovering from a stuff-up, and you presume the drive is fine but you just want to recover data from it. In that case using dd to do a direct dump of all the bits to another drive, then attacking that copy with recovery tools *may* be the way to go (though doing this with a big drive is difficult). The dump is going to make a clone, a copy made now should be the same as one made ten minute later, so there's no point in repeatedly trying to read a non-failed drive to get better results, and you don't risk anything going wrong with the original drive. Seeing as you said just plugging it into a Windows box but not letting Windows do it's "format the drive it doesn't recognise" routine was enough to kill it does kind of suggest the drive may be faulty. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue