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Extremely slow RAW partition image

Posted: 26 Feb 2018, 10:09
by IulianDita
Hello.

I got an external 2TB WD My Passport Ultra that appears to be RAW in disk management.
TestDsik is telling that there is a partition, I can list the files, but when I ran the imaging option, after 24h it only saved 1.3GB of data (I had to stop it).
Is this normal? Can I speed it up somehow?

Also, the computer is super slow processing any kind of input with the disk connected. It takes a few minutes to process any command, from TestDisk or any other application.

The hardrive is hardware encrypted / password protected (using the WD utility), and from the moment I plug the disk it takes about 10-15 minutes until I can start the imaging option in TestDisk. The WD utility is telling me that there is also a new firmware update available for my disk. Should I try to run that first? Should I try to unencrypt / remove the password protection first)

Thanks for any advice and for these amazing tools!

Re: Extremely slow RAW partition image

Posted: 27 Feb 2018, 07:26
by cgrenier
Try to clone the disk using ddrescue from a Linux USB key, read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf , it may give better performanse.

Re: Extremely slow RAW partition image

Posted: 27 Feb 2018, 15:48
by IulianDita
Alright, will try that. Thanks for the suggestion.

BTW, I updated the firmware and removed the password protection. Each operation took roughly 30 minutes.

Re: Extremely slow RAW partition image

Posted: 28 Feb 2018, 14:29
by IulianDita
DDrescue runs for 20h on a live Ubuntu session.
It recovered so far 2.5GB (0.12%), with no bad sectors but with 5 read errors. Average speed: 36KB/s. Estimated time remaining: 2126d 59m. :|
Is there a chance it will actually finish in a few days, not years? Maybe after getting past the bad portion?

Any advices?

Re: Extremely slow RAW partition image

Posted: 01 Mar 2018, 10:36
by IulianDita
After almost 2 days, still same speed. I stopped it and ran it again, this time adding -n -r1 -c16 parameters (it picked up exactly where I stopped it) and now the average speed is around 90KB/s.
Still 300+ days left :(