[mythtv-users] failing hard drive - advice on recovering specific recordings - mythlink perhaps

Jeremy Jones jeremy.dwain.jones at gmail.com
Sat Jun 28 20:39:05 UTC 2014


On Jun 28, 2014 2:36 PM, "Roger Heflin" <rogerheflin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Don't be sure it is not bad sectors.
>

As the OP I can provide some  information about the failure mechanism.
There are squeaks and clicks coming from the drive periodically,  so I
think it is a mechanical failure.  There are bad sectors, but they could be
a result of the mechanical failures.  I'm not too worried about the loss,
it is one of three mythtv drives and I consider all the recorded TV to be
expendable.  As for the brand it is a seagate and it is within warranty.

I have had good luck recovering needed data using ddrescue in the past,
but it really isn't worth the time to run that on a 3 TB drive, so I was
looking to maybe pull a few shows and movies off of it before it quit
responding altogether.  Using mythlink worked great, and I have managed to
salvage about 20GB of recordings so far.

The way I did it was to run mythlink, pointing the link destination to a
new folder.  Then I sorted the links in Thunar so that I could delete all
the ones not pointing to the failing drive.  Then I deleted the links I
didn't care about trying to save. After culling, I used 'cp -RL
/path-to-symlinks/ /destination-path/', to copy the actual file.

I have had to unplug and replug several time to get the drive to continue
to work.  On each retry I just delete the symlinks of the sucessful copies.
I also had to delete some files created by some of the failed copy attempts.

I have tried putting the drive in the freezer to cool it down quickly after
it quit responding. I will say though, after reading Raymonds post, I think
I will avoid that in the future and just let it air cool for longer.

Thanks all for the advice.

Jeremy
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