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!

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.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

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!