Hard drive unreadable

Question

The 500GB Seagate ST9500420AS (D005SDM1) hard drive in my 2011 Dell XPS 15 crashed the other day and, although I had the most important data backed up, I would really like to save the rest of it. It had been running Fedora (23, I think), had 3 ext4 partitions and 1 swap partition. I would be grateful for any tips on how I could access the partitions.

So, when I boot the computer I get the following error:

Operation system not found.

The BIOS diagnostic tool gives the following error:

Error Code 0147. Msg: Error Code 2000-0147. Msg: Optical Drive 0 - self test -- OPU failed.

I booted the computer from an Ubuntu 17.10 live USB stick and received a lot of kernel errors about the hard drive. The syslog is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/86kyicthla8k367/syslog.txt?dl=0

There seems to be some kind of an input/output error, but Google hasn't got me anywhere yet. When I run Gnome Disks, it displays the disk as "500 GB Unknown" and no partitions, but in the "Assessment" field it says: "Disk is OK,one bad sector". (Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0fqe5vrwlc90gz/hd_problem.png?dl=0)

If I try to make Disks create an image, it says that it's unreadable and replaces the data with zeros.

If you have any ideas on how I could access the data again, I'd be really grateful.

Answer 1

It's iffy, the HDD might be too far gone, but suppose it's not. The preferred method is to use a low level tool to back up whatever readable parts are left to a bigger hard drive, then look for any needed files on the backup. Sometimes a 2nd copy of the backup is needed, (to run fsck without risk, etc.), so the bigger hard drive should be at least twice as large, (i.e.: 500GBx2=1TB or more).

Linux tools for backups of balky HDDs include command line tools like ddrescue and safecopy.