Hey Guys -

I'll try to be as detailed as possible beacuse I'm not exactly sure what to do next.

First off, I have a 750GB Seagate 7200.12 that is failing. It still spins, no clicking/grinding, Ubuntu can *sometimes* read the partition table (though the longer the unit is running, the less likely it is that the partition table will be readable. It will not mount.

My SMART errors are:
Reallocated Sector Count - Normalized - 24 Worst - 24 Threshhold - 36 Value - 3129 Sectors
Current Pending Sector Count - Normalized - 79 Worst - 67 Threshhold - 0 Value - 886 Sectors

Initially running DDRescue with "sudo ddrescue -r1 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sbc2 clonetry.log -f" rescued 0B. It listed one error as 735GB (The size of the whole partition). Tweaking the command a bit, I was able to rescue just over 200GB with "sudo ddrescue -r1 -R -n /dev/sdc3 /dev/sbc2 clonetry.log -f" which was by far the best attempt I've had. I ran it without the -R flag to see if it would get anything else, but was unable to. This is the output:


Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued: 190985 MB, errsize: 547 GB, errors: 11
Current status
rescued: 190985 MB, errsize: 547 GB, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 0 B, errors: 11, average rate: 0 B/s
opos: 0 B, time from last successful read: 0 s
Finished

This attempt was better than my earlier one, clearly, but definitely less than ideal. Which is why I'm here.

Any advice other than a data recovery service? All of the ideas I have are more destructive than I would like them to be but, like most people, I don't have $1300 to hand over to get the data back. I don't have national secrets on the drive or anything, but the data is still important.

Y'know, the usual story. I just don't really know how to proceed.

Thanks in advance

For a better recovery, there is need of professional imaging equipment.
Without further tampering and assuming there is no hardware failure, the price should probably be half or less of what you mentioned.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

First of all remove -n from the command line - it could stop DDR from reading from already visited (and skipped) areas.
Also change -r1 to -r0. You'll make it a little bit faster.
Check in the log the error distribution - maybe you will see something interesting.
Maybe your hd becomes busy after some time. Then you have to stop the process and turn off/turn on your hd.

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data recovery Poland

Are you saying I should try this with a new log? without -R AND -n it hits an error immediately (735GB) that it can't split and rescues roughly 20MB from the drive (not the 200GB) I got with those tags. If I run that command with the same log it finishes immediately with the same results as the log.

You should stay with old log.
Have you seen the log ?

Are there long few or more GB error areas ?
If NO, try with -n. R can stay - it means the copying starts from the end LBA (Reverse).
If YES (huge bad areas) - maybe hdd became busy during cloning. You could use -A and -M

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data recovery Poland

Not sure exactly what you're asking by "Are there long few or more GB error areas?" - From what I can tell, there are a few, long error areas. I'll give it a show with -A and -M and report back.

Well, it's definitely huge bad areas during cloning. Ran it front and back (with and without -R) with --try-again and -M and no dice. Same 547GB errsize. I guess that's about all I can do, then?

Do you need to power-cycle the drive (and therefore probably the PC) to read anything more from the drive, after it has hit an error? If so, then yours might be another example of the behaviour also mentioned in this thread:

story-hdds-that-say-good-bye-access-defective-track-t24237.html

... and previous ones. As labtech already said, using a professional hardware imager at a DR company shouldn't cost $1300.

There are various things that could be tried, but you don't have the necessary additional hardware. If you are accepting the risks of DIY (e.g. you could make the situation worse, for a variety of reasons), then without using terminal access, one ddrescue technique you could try, is to start a run of ddrescue part-way through a large unreadable area (i.e. use the "-i" parameter), still keeping the reverse cloning approach. That is sometimes sucessful in recovering more data. The technique is simply that you are doing the splitting of the (in your case, 11) error area(s) yourself - ddrescue wants to do that, but can't do it, if the whole disk becomes unreadable.