On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Simon Hobson <linux@???>
wrote:

> OT, but there seem to be a few people who understand such in-depth stuff
> here ;-)
>
> I'm in the process of recovering (with ddrescue) files of a failing drive
> - no backups as "it's only TV" recordings and I can't afford the disk space
> anyway. It's going better than I expected with most of the files (typically
> anything between 1G and 4G in size) reading without any errors - retries on
> the disk, but no actual read errors.
> Tedious because when the drive warms up, it "goes titsup*" (producing lots
> of DID_BAD_TARGET errors) and I have to unplug it and let it cool down
> before restarting the recovery process.
>

I don't know the answer to your read-only question. But having done some
data recovery in the past, I've found that attaching the drive via USB and
sitting the drive in the freezer during recovery can help in situations
like this. Also, besides ddrescue you can also take a look at photorec
(part of the testdisk package).

Good luck!

-Rob