Steps for recovering data from a failing SSD

September 15, 2024 2:05 PM

I have an SSD in my computer that has stopped working and I have realized my backups were silently failing. The data isn't critical but I want to take a stab at getting it back. I have Windows, Linux, and Mac computers available to me so I can attach it to anything and give it a shot.

The drive was in my windows computer so it's NTFS formatted. At first Windows would only list some of the files in it. So I rebooted — then Windows did not recognize it at all and the disk utility in Windows said I needed to initialize the drive. At that point I realized it's probably failing so I shut my computer down and disconnected the drive just in case. So now that I have a NTFS drive whose only symptom is "doesn't seem to work anymore", what are my steps to try to recover the files? Some of them are backed up to the cloud so that's no problem, but the most important one whose backup has been silently failing (great job, Backblaze 🙄) is a large encrypted Veracrypt volume with personal data on it. Like I said this data isn't absolutely critical, anything important to me I can probably get from another source, but it would be convenient to recover it and move it to a working hard drive.

posted by Tehhund to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

A couple of years ago I used Macrium Reflect successfully to recover data off a dying HD, but no idea if it would/could help with SSD. Fwiw I used Macrium in its free trial mode, so if the free trail mode is still an available option for Macrium you might try that.
posted by anadem at 2:59 PM on September 15

Have you tried plugging it into another PC? It might be readable even if you can't boot from it.

If not I've had good luck with Recuva, which is free.
posted by fern at 5:51 PM on September 15

The open source Photorec utility may be worth a look. https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec Good luck!
posted by hh1000 at 5:51 AM on September 16

my gut feeling is that photorec won't help much with an encrypted archive, it is very good at reconstructing files from a trashed filesystem but that's not likely to help very much when the bytes are encrypted.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:37 AM on September 16

Response by poster: This thread gave me some terms to Google and I think I'm going to try to clone the drive with ddrescue.
posted by Tehhund at 8:55 AM on September 16

I have used ddrescue before, and it worked very well, but it was years ago and on a spinning disk so I didn't want to endorse it! but it did work to retrieve (almost) all of the bytes from a failing disk.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:24 AM on September 16 [1 favorite]

assuming you have or can buy another disk of double the size, even just a cheap spinner, i’d ddrescue it onto an image file on the second disk (so you never have to read from the failing ssd again), then duplicate that image and write lock the original (so you’ve got a saved copy of whatever got read from the ssd), then try whatever data recovery steps you can think of on the second copy. that way if your data recovery attempts actually further damage the filesystem you can always go back to what ddrescue managed to read from the original source.
posted by russm at 8:10 AM on September 17 [1 favorite]