Hard Drive Error

[giblets]

One of my hard drives has an error and I am on the verge of taking it to a hard drive clinic/recovery service as I cannot recall the last time I backed it up (3months ish). Wondering if there is anything else I can try before I do this.

 

It is a SATA 2tb drive that was formatted to ext4. I connect it to my laptop via a dock, and one day it started refusing to mount and reporting a bad superblock error. I think I have a copy of the screenshot saved somewhere which I will try to find. I had a similar error to this a long time ago with a different drive and I knew I could repair it, so I ran testdisk.

 

Testdisk sound the partition and said it could repair it, so I selected it to restore, and rebooted. Now it still fails to mount but I don't get the error at all, now when I look at the drive (via gparted) it says the partition is unknown. I am hesitant to try anything else in case I make it unrecoverable.

 

Any tips on what I can try or should I take it straight to a recovery service?

[sirjk]

Pretty much what I did when I recovered my PC files

[giblets]

I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

I have attached the smart-results.txt file to this post.

I was actually in the process of backing up this drive when it failed, which is disappointing! I'm not super upset that it might fail, but my other backup I think is about 3-4 months old as I didn't do it over the holiday break so I will lose some files at least, which if I could avoid that would be awesome.

The only thought about the cron job is that I don't always connect this drive, I try to only connect it when I need it to extend its life, so I would assume the cronjob would fail more often than not.

While you look at the smart-results file I will google what hard drive recovery services are nearby.

smart-results.txt

[sirjk]

Ignore my message, I realised you used Linux, not Windows!

Edited March 5, 2018 by sirjk

[giblets]

Ok thanks @stablish.

 

I submitted a few quote requests to several data recovering companies, and they're all quoting around $250. I think that is worth it for what could possibly be up to 3 months of files. I will have to get a second drive for them to copy them onto first - the only other drive I have is the backup drive, so it will be a few weeks before I get this fixed.

 

The silver lining in the cloud here is it has encouraged me to replace my drives! They're the same age so they all will likely have these issues soon. I think they are roughly 5-6 years old each. I'll try to work out a reminder in 4 years to swap them out to save me $250

 

If I can write the script to be executed whenever I need it, that would be super helpful. I manually run dd to backup my laptop and then drag and drop the files for the drive which has had permission errors a few times. If there was a script I could execute instead that would be awesome! This is the part of Linux I really like, how you can automate so much stuff, I just haven't got my hands dirty with it yet.

[giblets]

Excellent, thanks @stablish, I will definitely take you up on that. I have 4 drives that I basically clone once a month to an identical set of 4 drives, via either dd (a few times I haven't got this to work though) or copy and paste the entire drive. I used to have server/NAS running for all my files but found I barely used it and didn't want to have it using so much power or my drives spinning all the time and ultimately failing... and here we are!

I have ordered some new drives so I'll let you know when they arrive!

[giblets]

@stablish, what do you think of Deja Dup?

The podcast I was listening to today (Going Linux) mentioned it as an easy tool. A quick search found this link.

My distro doesn't have it for some reason (even though it's ubuntu) so after your advice before I install it on my machine.

I assume I'll still need to make an image of my install that I could restore if need be.

Similarly, I was listening to Security Now and one of the hosts is the writer of SpinRite. Is it worth giving that program a try with my hard drive before handing it over to a specialist? Still waiting for my drives to appear.