Recovering Data from a Dying Drive: ddrescue, Imaging, and What Not to Do
Every other article in this pillar assumes the drive is healthy. Burn-in testing catches problems before a drive ever holds data, and SMART monitoring catches the warning signs during normal service life. This one is about the moment after that, when a drive is already failing and you need to get the data off it, now, with as little further damage as possible. The single biggest mistake people make here is treating a dying drive like a normal one. They try to copy files off it, or run chkdsk, or re-run a SMART self-test “to see how bad it is.” Every one of those actions reads from a drive that’s already struggling to read reliably, and every extra read is a chance to turn a partially failing drive into a completely dead one. The right first move is almost always the opposite of instinct: stop touching the drive directly, and image it instead. ...