How can I backup a disk with a live boot of linux?

I'm pretty sure I'd done this maybe 15 years ago but I'd forgotten how to do it. I have an external hard drive which was reading, kinda spotty, when connected, it would drop in and out. So, I took it out of the enclosure. Before that, though my drive fell on the ground, then was ticking. I actually confirmed this was happening before removing the HDD from the enclosure. In either case, the drive will turn on, tick and then go silent. Additionally, it'll freeze Explorer and now not show the drive letter.

My idea was to try booting into a Linux Live USB and attempting to recover the data that way, as I've heard Linux is more forgiving in reading drives.

What do I do to get the ball rolling, in creating a live USB from Windows 10? Furthermore, I'm not really sure what commands to use, if I get lucky and my drive is readable in Linux. Any help or site references would be greatly appreciated.

Paul Black said:

Hello @OSHSKORN;,
Basically . . .
[1] Download the Linux ISO [ I always use Linux Mint although there are others ].
[2] Create a bootable USB/DVD using Rufus for example => Rufus.
[3] Boot the media.
[4] Copy the files from the OS to an external HDD.

> Download Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

I hope this helps!

Thanks! I feel like the last time I tried to do something like this, or maybe I was updating BIOS, I don't remember exactly, but certain flash drives would not be bootable, and I feel like it had to do with the capacity of the USB Flash drive, itself. Is that an issue nowadays? Again, it's been several years since I've tried this. Maybe 15, not sure but I probably updated BIOS only a few years ago, in fact, I need to do that again, since I never did patch for Spectre/Meltdown, which is a whole different topic (I know better what to download so I'm convinced it's safe, plus I heard the fix slows your computer down).

Paul Black said:

Hello @OSHSKORN;,
You could of course create a Bootable DVD [ the ISO is about 1.9 GB ]. This way you could keep it for future use, if needed.

I hope this helps!

I managed to be able to create the boot drive and I got into Linux. Can you help me interpret what's going on, here? I went to my Computer, saw that my USB Flash drive was plugged in, but I did not see the drive that is plugged into my SATA II to USB dock. I then went to Terminal, typed in lsusb, both with and without my dock plugged in. The only difference was with the dock plugged in, I got this:

Code:

Bus 004 Device 006: ID 2537:1068 Norelsys NS1068

From what I understand, it's a USB 3.0 to SATA II Bridge Controller, which is my dock. What can I do from here, if anything?

Have you gparted or similar in your linux distro? Check if that sees it.

You didn't tell us which distro you are using.

SIW2 said:

Have you gparted or similar in your linux distro? Check if that sees it.
You didn't tell us which distro you are using.

I'm using Linux Mint 20 Ulyana, the one @Paul Black mentioned in Post #2.

What do you mean by gparted? Forgive me, I'm clueless. I did a live boot, not an installation.

Unfortunately, I do not have another drive to test. I'm wondering if the problem could be that Linux doesn't recognize my dock and cannot go any further to recognize there's a HDD plugged into it.

gparted is a linux partition manager which they have instead of windows disk management, and it is much more capable.

See if it shows up there.

SIW2 said:

gparted is a linux partition manager which they have instead of windows disk management, and it is much more capable.
See if it shows up there.

So basically, redo my USB Bootable disk but this time instead of choosing mint, I should download and choose gparted-live-1.1.0-5-i686.iso, correct? I saw this video (skip past the first 11 minutes, he's just explaining what to download and how to make the usb flash bootable).

I am pretty sure gparted is included in the mint live session. Or you could just use a gparted usb.