How can I recover data in a failed hard drive?

Ben

2/19/23, 7:06 PM

My hdd with all the partitions (ext4) for Ubuntu failed.
Two days ago, I started to hear repeated beeping every a few seconds, and it sometimes became silent for hours, and then came back.

Today, I couldn't boot into it, and it was stuck at entering the emergency mode, allowing me only to see some report by using command journalctl , and reboot again.

I have pulled the hdd out and connected it via a SATA-USB adapter to another laptop with Ubuntu, but it was not shown by lsblk, and only recognized as one /dev/sdb by lshw with no partitions shown.

An hour later, a bit to my surprise, the other laptop seems to have silently make some progress on discovering the failed hard drive. lsblk now shows the partitions of /dev/sdb. and df shows only the root partition of /dev/sdb but not the other partitions. Two partitions have been mounted in /media/, but ls and cd on them get stuck, so does lshw.

Any one knows what is going on?

What can I do for recovering the data?

Thanks.

0 + 0

filesystem

ext4

data-recovery

cocomac

2/19/23, 7:53 PM

It is often possible to recover data from a failed hard drive. _But_, if the data is important or critical (say, important business documents or family photos), get a professional data recovery service to do it. They have special tools that you won't, and also often have a clean room to open up and repair part of the drive to help recover data. Also, **remember to take regular backups of important data**.

Ben

2/19/23, 8:03 PM

Thanks @cocomac. What services do you know are good? Do they require me to visit personally or not? If yes, what are some around NYC?

cocomac

2/19/23, 8:08 PM

I haven't ever needed to recover a drive (I haven't had any drives fail. Yet.), so I can't suggest any companies. They do not visit you personally. The drive needs to come to them, as their tools and clean room isn't portable. It is an entire room, after all. As for more specifics, like if you ship the drive, or if they access your server remotely, or something else, you would need to contact a specific company and ask them. Just a warning: **do not ask on Ask Ubuntu (or other simaler Stack Exchange sites) for a recommendation for a good service**. Service recommendations are off-topic.

Ben

2/19/23, 8:15 PM

@cocomac I understand the concern. But I trust people here more than elsewhere. So please let me know if anyone knows.

cocomac

2/19/23, 8:18 PM

I'm glad you trust the community. I didn't mean to be unhelpful, I simply wanted to give you a heads-up so people don't downvote you. On your favorite search engine, try searching for "data recovery new york" or something simaler. Read the reviews, and find one that seems good.

Nmath

2/19/23, 9:02 PM

We don't provide or solicit opinions pertaining to things like paid services or hardware purchases. **Don't ask.** This opens the site up to abuse. Besides, you're not going to get an unbiased recommendation from a representative sample in a situation like this. Read product descriptions and consumer reviews from those sites who host reviews. As far as data recovery specialists, it costs a fortune. But if the data is really essential and your backup solution fails or is non existent, it's your best chance of recovering data. Anything you do in the meantime can cause further damage or loss.

Nmath

2/19/23, 9:05 PM

One option would be to create a bit-for-bit copy of the disk before attempting any further tasks. But even then, depending on why the drive failed, you could still cause further problems. For example, if the hard drive failure was the result of a mechanical problem, just turning the drive on or reading from it can greatly exacerbate the problem and greatly reduce the chances anything can be recovered, even from a clean room.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: How can I recover data in a failed hard drive?

TH: ฉันจะกู้คืนข้อมูลในฮาร์ดไดรฟ์ที่ล้มเหลวได้อย่างไร

RO: Cum pot recupera datele de pe un hard disk defect?

RU: Как восстановить данные на вышедшем из строя жестком диске?

VI: Làm cách nào để khôi phục dữ liệu trong ổ cứng bị lỗi?

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.