Using ddrescue on a failing hard drive

While I was out at MacIT last week, our Casper server sent me a notification that the “Check for failing hard drive” smart group had a member. Since that’s a club that nobody wants to be a part of, I forwarded the notification to the team at home to let them know. They were able to copy the user’s home folder data off to the server and left the box itself and its failing drive for me to take a look at when I got home.

Once I took a look, the SMART status report of Failing and the weird noises from the drive made me certain that it was only a few steps short of the Choir Eternal. However, I still wanted to see if I could get the maximum amount of data off of it before its final demise. Time for ddrescue.