data recovery?

K

kr651129

I have an external SimpleTech 1TB hard drive that I suspect is going bad. When I turn on the power the light blinks on and off and the system doesn't see it in camcontrol. I removed the drive from the enclosure and mounted it via usb.

Code: 
# mount -t ntfs /dev/da1s1 /usr/home/kclark/external

This command just sits without returning a prompt. I can leave it for an hour and nothing happens. When I kill power or unplug it I get an error message saying the device is not configured. A few weeks ago I dumped all my vital information over to my home server because it has been acting up on me for a while now but I still have some non-essential data I'd like to get from it.

I'm running DFT on the drive waiting for the results. I'm not getting an "click of death" from the drive so I'd imagine using dd to remap the bad block will work.

Here are my questions.

1. If DFT comes back and says the drive has passed, will dd force a remap of the bad blocks?

2. Is there any good FreeBSD data recovery software?
 
If you have a drive that is suspected to be failing, the very first thing to do is copy all data from it. If the filesystem can't be mounted, use dd(1) to make an image of the whole drive.

After that has been done, run drive tests, not before, because if the drive really is failing, more running time will lead to more errors and more lost data.

Remapping bad blocks is not a cure, and requires writing to them, so it will wipe out existing data on the drive anyway.
 
wblock -- thanks for the reply. I can't use dd to make an image because I don't have another drive around large enough to fit the data. The good news, I got all essential data off last week so if I do end up with anymore lost data it's no big deal.

Just for education sake let me ask this question, if the drive comes back as pass with DFT what could cause the disk to not mount? I've already come to the conclusion the reason the drive wasn't spinning up in the first place was because of the enclosure...once I removed the drive it spins up and can be seen.
 
If you can't copy all the data off the drive due to lack of space then recovery is going to be a lot harder. You could try installing PhotoRec (part of the TestDisk suite). It will try to work with the original drive and grab any good pieces of data or files. Ideally it should be run on an image of the drive, but it can work with physical hardware.
 
If the drive is fine, I'd suspect filesystem corruption from the failing power supply. NTFS just makes that worse. The existing filesystem may be repairable with sysutils/ntfsprogs or a live CD that includes them, like GParted. Otherwise, reformat, preferably with something more cross-platform than NTFS.
 
It was a bad drive, when I ran dd sometime it'd write 30ish GB of data, I'd run again it's write 130ish GB, I did this and it gave different results each time before giving me an input/output error. Time for a new drive.
 
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