I'm trying to rescue data from a failing external USB drive from a friend. The problem with the drive is that it cannot be read, not in windows, not in linux. But I do manage to run ddrescue on the drive and build an image of the drive for later processing.
However, I started the process in January this year, and it has been running non stop, and still running. So over 5 months now. First it was running at about 2000 b/s, now it fell back to 200 b/s. It rescued about 27gb of data (drive is 2TB) and according to friend this is also more or less the amount of data that was stored on the drive. The rescued size is still increasing, but veeeeeeeeeery slowly. Eg in the past 3 weeks it increased by 200mb.
Is there any way to stop the process and just continue with what has been rescued until now, or does ddrescue really has to complete the entire process in order to work with the img file ?
Today ddrescue stopped, because the drive went missing. Below is a picture of what I have on the screen, with ddrescue log viewer running, not sure if it gives an idea of the situation. I restarted ddrescue and it's running again at the same slow speed as before.
ddrescue
backwards. BTW you wrote it's an external USB drive... did you try removing the drive from its case (probably SATA) and using a brand new SATA-to-USB cable?