Hello Randall, Randall Meyer via Bug reports for ddrescue, data recovery tool. wrote:
Anyhow, preliminaries out of the way, I have what I believe to be a failing drive on my 6520, but I recently have taken the thing on-line, with one of the earliest and simplest builds of Windows 10, and I FINALLY managed to turn off all the forced updates and forced uploads. Luckily, I have a 128 Gb flashdrive with puppylinux on it (fossapup build) and I can access the internet for advice while I try to assess the slow HDD (2.5" laptop type: not big desktop 3.5" internal). But my point is, perhaps windows is corrupted, by a virus or just regular internet-clog, and that's why it is slow? But perhaps it is the drive. The SMART test was a bit inconclusive.
If the drive is just slow but does not give I/O errors, it may be better to just copy the files in it with 'cp -an', or even make a backup with tar or tarlz. Starting ddrescue or dd each day with shutdowns interleaved may easily end in disaster (overwritten source drive, for example).
Best regards, Antonio.