I recently had a friend with a new Hitachi 2TB 32MB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Desktop Hard Drive with Win7 Pro OS that was reported by Windows as failing. He asked me to recover it and replace the drive. This was not a boot drive. It still had a few days to return it to the vendor.
I was unable to access it with anything in a new PC (with different known working SATA controller and SATA data and power cables).
Interestingly, Hitachi's DFT reported everything was fine: SMART Status : Healthy
Test Log
ReadErrStat : Done
Result : Pass
SMART QT : Done
Result : Pass
Despite 3 Windows Events indicating the same SMART failure. Description: The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk3\DR3 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.
I used ddrescue 1.18.1 on System Rescue CD.
Because the HDD was new I expected all the data/files would be in the first quarter of the drive. ddrescue took about 25 hours to burrow its way through the 2TB drive and write to a new 2TB drive (I suspect some now know what my issue will be). I didn't have any bigger drives.
ddrescue -n -f /dev/sdb /dev/sdc resq.log
ddrescue recovered all but 347 files (about 0.5%), but reported it could not properly finish because it ran out of drive space on the destination drive. The slow transfer rate as well as the rising count of non-recovered files ended about one quarter into the recovery process indicating it was past where the--or at least most--data files were present and was literally now recovering virgin territory.
These were both NTFS formatted, single partition of the entire drive drives (new one was a new Toshiba 2TB HDD).
On Linux, I cannot mount the recovered drive to copy it, nor view it. Keep getting NTFS format error.
I do not want to see if anything is visible on a Window OS due to the propensity of such to offer to fix things, which I do not want it to attempt.
To make matters worse, I bought and GPT formatted a 4TB drive and started to repeat the ddrescue and the failing HDD completely failed less than 10% of the way in.
I have been reading the ddrescue manual as well as several forums and cannot find for certain instructions on how to repair the "full" destination drive so it is accessible. I do not want to make any mistakes that could corrupt data further. Anyone have any ideas on rescue/repair so I can make a copy and then see what was recovered and where things stand?