Hard drive failing: Data seems fine but it keeps stopping

[thesun]

Totally new here, and deep apologies if this is a dumb question: I was getting i/o errors on a drive for months and finally decided it must be faulty...the symptoms were that it would work fine when I started up and then after a few hours or a day, suddenly everything was i/o errors...just impossible to do anything at all.

Now I'm copying the disk to another with ddrescue and noticing that it seems to have zero errors so far, about 50% through, but it stops running for 5 or 10 mins, then runs for a minute, then stops...

Does anyone know if this is a common failure? I've had disks fail where it simply can't read any data anymore. I've never had one that seems fine and then just takes a catnap for a bit and starts up again.

Fingers crossed, I'm just going to keep running this all night or days if need be, get everything moved to a new disk, and go from there. Just curious if anyone has had similar issues happen.

Thank you!

[lcoughey]

The odds are, the PCB is failing. The saftest thing to do is to use a healthy donor board with a ROM swap. Short of that, you can try to set the drive PCB up and keep it cool with a fan blowing on it.

[thesun]

Thank you, @lcoughey. I appreciate the info. I seem to have been able to get the data off...probably won't need to use a donor drive. Just glad to know what was happening. Thanks again!