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I assume my external exFAT hard drive is dead. There are many questions about ddrescue but typically the poster manages to recover something. I just want an analysis of my results.

ddrescue shows:

ddrescue results

I have left it for longer than this before and the percentage rescued is always 0.00%

I also used TestDisk in Windows and that gave a "Read Error"

Sometimes I can ls the files and directories in the external hard drive; usually ls just hangs and never completes. I cannot copy the directories using cp -r for example as the copy process never gets past 0 bytes. But, clearly, Ubuntu (and Windows) can view the file structure. The problem is accessing the files and moving, copying, viewing them.

Any suggestions? There is almost 2TB of data which I would prefer not to lose but if the external drive is dead then it is dead.

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  • how did you invoke ddrescue specifically?
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Jan 10 at 13:11
  • It might be time to either consider the data lost or opt for a professional service.
    – harrymc
    Commented Jan 10 at 15:59
  • @FrankThomas - I used: sudo ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb log.txt where sda is the source (the external hard drive).
    – 80432232
    Commented Jan 10 at 17:03
  • the disk is likely dead, but you may want to remove its enclosure, install it internally in your system, check it's SMART stats, and if it looks healthy, try again. I recommend a multipass process with ddrescue, like this: superuser.com/a/786544/171793
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Jan 10 at 20:48

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