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sfabius

Member

Registered: 2007-07-07

Posts: 153

[solved] Yanked encrypted usb hard drive during rsync

I have a USB hard drive LUKS encrypted. I was using it to back up a directory and unthinkingly moved my laptop, at which point the drive tumbled to the floor.
Things look grim. I have managed (well, waited until) the system actually recognized /dev/sda, but does not find a partition.
For an unencryted drive I guess I would fsck, but I think that is dangerous.
This is new territory as I am not used to encrypted stuff either.
Please let me know if you think there is something to try before I give up.
Here's the dmesg.

Last edited by sfabius (2020-08-25 14:05:19)

sabroad

Member

Registered: 2015-05-24

Posts: 242

Re: [solved] Yanked encrypted usb hard drive during rsync

I have a USB hard drive LUKS encrypted. I was using it to back up a directory and unthinkingly moved my laptop, at which point the drive tumbled to the floor.

Based on the dmesg, it looks like the HDD has failed, and pretty catastrophically at that.

I wouldn't hold much hope for data recovery and wouldn't trust it with new data. Hopefully you have the data elsewhere and another drive lying around. Sorry for your loss.

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saint_abroad

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 50,933

Re: [solved] Yanked encrypted usb hard drive during rsync

The reason why you still get /dev/sda is that the drives firmware responds, but there's a truckload of IO errors so I'm afraid sabroad is right.
For an unencrypted device, you could go w/ dd_rescue and testdisk to see what you can scrap, but w/ an encryted device and no read access to the partition map, you're kinda fucked :-(

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frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,417

Re: [solved] Yanked encrypted usb hard drive during rsync

looks like a full head crash since it already fails reading sectors 0, 1, 2, ... which is never accessed while in use so it can't be due to yanking itself.

a data recovery lab might get some back, but encryption makes it much more difficult... if you can't recover the LUKS header perfectly, everything else is gone, too.

sfabius

Member

Registered: 2007-07-07

Posts: 153

Re: [solved] Yanked encrypted usb hard drive during rsync

Thanks all, good to know to not keep trying and get a different drive for backup. Fortunately everything is in other places, certainly the really important stuff.