My both hard drives where all my data is stored are failing. My system insconstently refuses to load the disks and mount the partitions. I moved one hard drive to other computer where it is recognized with less trouble but the partition has many errors, and I still get E/S errors on dmesg for that drive.

The partition for start has a bad superblock but it can be read with an alternative superblock where it shows even more errors so i did first a master backup of the partition on an external hard drive. I did two passes on ddrescue for this reason and it exited with only one error of 512 bytes acccording to the log, which I think is promising.

Listing the backup with lsblk looks even more promising:

Where lsblk for the damaged partition shows:

Where the now master shows:



Now I did another backup from this master partition to the end of the same drive, so the actual output of lsblk would be:


Now here it is where is missed up things, I mistaken option p of fsck for option f so i have done

fsck -fy /dev/sdc2
which screwed it up some things and deleted some many nodes which after mounting it listed half of the files that should be, affortunately this is a copy of a copy of the damaged hard drive, so this time i will be more cautious.

Could you tell me please some good practices? my all data is in a gamble right now so please be precise.

Does lsblk make any changes to the partitions? can I mount a partition without doing any changes on it? I have this link handy btw: https://www.sans.org/blog/how-to-mount- ... e-systems/

How to safely do a fsck so i can win some time here? Does fsck -n still make changes to the partition? Does it make any difference where in the disk is a copy of a partition?

Is it any way of recovering the files without dealing with filesystem? I have read about photorec but i have many audacity file it would not recognize. Isnt it there anything more generic?

If your data is critical take it to a professional - this would be a minimal cost recovery.

If I understand your post, you have successfully cloned the failing drives with minimal errors but you can't get to the partitions.

Grab yourself a copy of rstudio or DMDE, both are available for linux and should offer you a point and click recovery of your data at minimal cost.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/