Problem with drive

[alienjon]

I was trying to setup an old drive to use for backups in my home server. I've had it for a while, but haven't touched it in quite some time (it's ironically been sitting comfortably in the chassis, so not moved around or anything). I was able to format it, but didn't have time to try to setup any backup software until now. Now when I try to mount the drive I discovered that the partition is missing and I'm getting errors in dmesg. I suspect the drive is dead, but wanted to ask for any thoughts before I get rid of it.

[Zucca]

It looks like it's dead or nearly dead.

I'd try to use some rescue tool (ddrescue maybe) to create an image of the drive first, so that you have as intact copy of the data as possible. After that you can diagnose the drive by running long SMART test.

You could later use, for example, foremost to pull out valuable data from the image.
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[alienjon]

@Zucca

Thanks, this is quite helpful. I'd seen recommendations for ddrescue, but will not go that route as I don't actually have enough free space to store the 3TB drive at the moment (and I'm 99% sure it's blank anyway at the moment - if not, I haven't used it in long enough that whatever's on it shouldn't be that important - my important storage is elsewhere).

I'm running a long SMART test now 9estimated to run for 333 minutes, so I'll try to remember to check the status in 2 and a third days :-p

Time for a new drive! Thanks again!