Cannot select partition table type

[laerne]

Hello I'm trying to fix a usb 1TB usb 3 hard drive.

However, I cannot select the partition table type because the program freezes.
I just select the correct hard drive (it took half an hour to testdisk to list them), and the it's been 10 hours since I selected and I'v still no update to the screen.

I believe that if I have to enter the partition table type I don't have to wait for testdisk to read the whole disk to guess, huh ? And if it actually tries to auto-guess, I hope it can remember the main features, so it doesn't to rescan fully the disk or whatever. Anyway I'm concerned, I cannot see any testdisk in "iotop -P -o".

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  PID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>    COMMAND
 7946 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.13 % [kworker/5:2]   
  334 be/3 root        0.00 B/s  677.63 B/s  0.00 %  0.11 % [jbd2/sda5-8]
  440 be/4 root        0.00 B/s  223.01 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % systemd-journald
  839 be/4 root        0.00 B/s   11.91 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % rsyslogd -n
 2690 be/4 denethor    0.00 B/s   31.10 K/s  0.00 %  0.00 % firefox

So what's is it doing ? The status of the testdisk process in top is always "uninterruptible sleep", "sleep" or "traced or stopped". I have no idea what the process is doing right, how long it might take and the lack of feedback (the ncurses interface is frozen) is atrocious. Am I supposed to wait ? To kill it ? What ? What is it doing ?

Thank you for any help !

[cgrenier]

Run "dmesg", there may be error message. "strace -p testdisk_PID" may show that a read operation is blocked.
The disk or its electronic is probably physically damaged. Connect the disk via an internal SATA connector and check if the problem is still here.

[laerne]

"usb-storage" reports a bunch of ongoing same errors in "dmesg". Since I have only one usb drive, I guess this is it. I don't think my dirve can be connected via SATA, that's the issue.

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% dmesg | tail -n 3
[90785.976122] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000
[90785.994103] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000
[90786.012066] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000
% dmesg | tail -n 3
[90786.605512] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000
[90786.623485] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000
[90786.641445] usb-storage: Error in queuecommand_lck: us->srb = ffff88040549e000

I didn't know "strace" but it doesn't help.
I report blatantly nothing. Maybe I could try to dump file descriptors with it, but I'm unsure of the file descriptor numbers I should use.

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# strace -p 3396
Process 3396 attached

[cgrenier]

It looks bad. If you can't connect the disk via SATA, you will have to contact a data recovery company...

[laerne]

That's too bad. The disk havn't any SATA port, and it is still under warranty. I don't know what's best from now on. Thank you for your help !