Please help me rescueing a failing hard drive with an ext4

[hardhead]

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:

Code:

    $lsblk -f
    NAME   FSTYPE   LABEL        UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
    ...
    sda                                                               
    └─sda1 
    ...                                                         
                                                     

Where the now master shows:

Code:

  sdc                                                               
    ├─sdc1 ext4     new          8cab6f75-1ea7-4451-9f48-2bbcce167184

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

Code:

  lsblk -f
    NAME   FSTYPE   LABEL        UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
    fd0                                                               
    loop0  squashfs                                                   /snap/anbox-installer/25
    loop2  squashfs                                                   /snap/core/9669
    loop3  squashfs                                                   /snap/core/10911
    sda                                                               
    └─sda1                                                           
    sdb                                                               
    ├─sdb1 ext4     Debian_copia ce2c8e8f-f3ef-4005-9cb1-0bb9d5870f43 /
    └─sdb2 swap                  d60a8ad0-5528-4bbc-af5e-092b96282df4 [SWAP]
    sdc                                                               
    ├─sdc1 ext4     new          8cab6f75-1ea7-4451-9f48-2bbcce167184
    └─sdc2 ext4     new          8cab6f75-1ea7-4451-9f48-2bbcce167184
    sr0                                                               


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?

[Lardman]

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.