Re: [gentoo-user] USB crucial file recovery

[Neil Bothwick]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2016 11:49:44 -0700, Grant wrote:

> I have a USB stick with a crucial file on it (and only an old backup
> elsewhere).  It's formatted NTFS because I wanted to be able to open
> the file on various Gentoo systems and my research indicated that NTFS
> was the best solution.

If it's only to be used on Gentoo (or Linux) systems, why not ext2?

> [ 2794.535837] Buffer I/O error on dev sdc1, logical block 2134902,
> lost async page write
> [ 2842.568843] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 FAILED Result:
> hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [ 2842.568849] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Sense Key : Hardware Error
> [current] [ 2842.568852] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 Add. Sense: No
> additional sense information
> [ 2842.568857] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] tag#0 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 01 04 a4
> 58 00 00 f0 00
> [ 2842.568859] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 17081432
> [ 2842.568862] buffer_io_error: 20 callbacks suppressed
>
> nmon says sdc is 100% busy but doesn't show any reading or writing.  I
> once pulled the USB stick in a situation like this and I ended up
> having to reformat it which I need to avoid this time since the file
> is crucial.  What should I do?

That looks horribly like a hardware failure. The first step should be to
see if you can dd the stick to an image file (without mounting it). Then
you can work on the image file, or a copy of it, and try things like
testdisk.

If dd also gives hardware errors, ddrecsue may be able to recover some of
it, hopefully including the important bits, but I'm not holding my breath
for you :(


-- 
Neil Bothwick

When there's a will, I want to be in it.