Hard drive Ejects itself while running ddrescue

Question

I don't know who to blame apple or ddrescue. So Sorry if this is in the wrong place! :)

I have

• Macbook pro Intel core I7 running Maverick

• Failed 120Gb HDD (really old... more than 8 years I think)

So Natural I run ddrescue. But when the ddrescue gets to "Splitting Failed Blocks" step the disk ejects and recounts to my mac. but ddrescue seem to miss the memo, and keeps doing it's thing, even though the HDD has left the station.

The command had no flags.

Also it doesn't eject when I told ddrescue to skip the split stage "-n"

I am at a point where I need it to start splitting to dig deep for that data.

Has this happened to any one else?

I know that there were people who had problems with long cables but I'm not that case. (all small cables)

I'm going to try raw accessing the HDD to see if I can dig up more data next.

Answer 1

I won't blame anything or body except a failing hard drive. There is a old trick where you place a defective hard drive in an ESD safe bag and store it in the freezer for a couple hours. Once the metal is cold through the bag then try accessing the files again. You might have luck without ddrescue (which I am not aware of or experienced with) and the drive might just show up in Finder. However if it doesn't or it keeps ejecting and remounting you could drive a different computer or send the disk into specialists for data recovery.

Cheers