I'll try to be brief. I got a 4TB WD external HDD from a friend. He told me that it is no longer accessible and he needs the data.
It is one of those drives with a USB PCB.
- Tried Windows, no chance, the OS becomes laggy and unresponsive.
- Installed Xubuntu and disabled automount. Partition appeared and disappeared from lsblk over and over again.
- After switching from USB 3.0 to USB 2.0, the drive became reasonably stable. Even though it took forever for the partition to be recognised. Copying files with Testdisk was possible, but only at about 30MB per hour.
- Applied the WD royl patch mod 02 using HDDSuperTool and got reasonable speeds at about 35MB/s.
- Tried imaging the whole drive using HDDSuperClone but it didn't work well.
- Tried mounting the drive (dumb idea). Linux reported a corrupted file system, tried to repair it and got stuck. (Now the drive is stable under windows but RAW)
Last thing i did was backing up 400GB of the most important Data using Testdisk, although the drive makes death clicks from time to time or stops responding for a minute, it kept running and running. However, windows is not particularly happy with the restored files, especially all the zone.identifier files. I had to run chkdsk over the new disk and it fixed a bunch of stuff.
I still don't know what the problem is. Maybe it's just a corrupted file system after all? SMART values are also still good. At the moment i'm looking for a more convenient tool than Testdisk or advice on what to do next, as i have no Linux experience and no idea what i'm doing here. DMDE looks promising, but the free version does not allow complete folder structures to be restored.
Thx in advance