Backing up a damaged SSD

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I looked into forensic images a bit.  I found the information unorganized
enough to be just irritating.  When I'm not under time pressure, I'll
probably try to sort out what makes sense for me.

However, thanks for reminding me about ddrescue.  That was just what I
needed.  But I wound up finding it could not work any better than the other
tools, and for a reason that surprised me: the actual problem was not with
the NVME drive, but with the drive dock I was sending the backups to.  It
would freeze.  At first briefly, but after 20 minutes or so it would freeze
so completely that nothing could touch that drive.  Even reboot was slowed
enormously or completely stalled.  Turning off the drive dock was the only
"solution".  I've filed a review on that product.

I got clean backups with all tools after I substituted a drive dock of a
different manufacturer.



On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 7:42 PM Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 6:51 PM Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I've got a laptop with a damaged main drive.  It's a 2TB NVME SSD, and
>> gets an error on a dd copy of the main Ubuntu partition, and about 200
>> errors on a ntfsclone --rescue of my Windows partition.
>>
>> Of course, I'm getting it replaced -- it's even under warranty from the
>> company that makes the laptop.  But I'd like to have the best backup
>> possible.  I like the ntfsclone --rescue option.  I wonder if the dd
>> --ignore-failed-read works the same way -- skip a single sector, on both
>> the input and the output or whether is skips a whole block of the size I
>> told it to use.  I also wonder if there's anything better.
>>
>
> I believe this is the exact sort of situation ddrescue was designed for...
> though I don't know whether it handles SSD drives as well as "old
> fashioned" magnetic drives. You will also need some other utilities to work
> with (what's left of) the recovered files.
>
> Several places have assembled "forensic" bootable images that include all
> the utilities you might need.
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman
#define QUESTION ((bb) || (!bb))   /* Shakespeare */

Please consider the environment before printing this email.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20190718/7336ac7d/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 441 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20190718/7336ac7d/attachment.gif>