Barely functioning HD, and seeking advice re: how to successfully record in blu-ray

[Paul King]

The 1TB Seagate I had been using and trying to recover data from is being
officially 

declared "pooched".

 

The Linux partitions on it which I thought were viable were not upon closer 

examination. Nearly all files and directories were missing below the root
level of any

partition I looked at.

 

I thought that it may be the external HD connection that was the problem. It
was 

connected with a housing that was a SATA/EIDE hybrid, so I just used one
which was

pure SATA. No luck there either.

 

The ddrescue program produced a 3GB file which is not mountable, and yes I
used 

"-o loop". 3GB out of half of a terabyte is not much, but it is easily
enough for email.

The file has been kept, but at present it is pretty much taking up space.

 

While I give out an enormous thanks for Hugh's advice and encouragement, I
think

that I need to move on. Most things can be recovered from existing DVDs and
CDs

I have around, except they too are slowly succumbing to bit-rot. My personal
email must

now be declared "forever lost".

 

Luckily I have an LG Blu-Ray USB external drive with a Windows-based burner
that 

promises  to back things onto fresh media. Except that I have had a hard
time with this. 

Of 6 BD disks that spent several minutes in the bay with the progress bar
doing nothing, 

only to return a "burn failed" error, one may have been successful. This is
far worse

a success record than when DVD burning first came out. Since these are my
first 

experiences with recording on to BD media, I don't know if this is expected
or not.

 

Is anyone able to suggest the conditions which will optimize the chances for
a 

successful burn? This is for files on an entertainment center which is
single-boot, unless

you know of "live" distros which have k3b or something similar. Meatime, I
just thought

of going back to my Partition Magic (Slackware) DVD to see if anything
useful is there.

 

Paul King

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20130818/d16f75a8/attachment.html>