[tde-users] data recovery - recommendations & strategies

Hello again! I told you that you'd miss me when I'm gone. :-] Please, I need recommendations or strategies for recovering data. I had a flash drive become unreadable, after I plugged it into my new printer to print out some documents that had been long in waiting. Then, before I could save myself, I had a 1.5 TB hard drive also fail. On this hard drive is (of course) the source of those backup copies on the flash drive. This is the partition which I was just about to backup. I have several hard drives, from 200 GB up to 8 TB, from 20 years old to brand-new; all are WD, except for one which is Seagate. Guess which one failed? I forget when I got it, or why I ever would have got anything but WD, or why I would have put anything important there. I have used ddrescue to try to recover the data, as well as other forensics tools. Recovered images (img and iso) are saved, and taking up space, but I cannot determine if there is any useful content in what was recovered. The failing partition has not been deleted. It cannot be read or mounted, so I have just left it like that, so that I can try to save it. Every attempt to recover the data gives the same result: 2 errors, 3072 B, that cannot be read. I tried using tools to look inside the saved iso image, but no luck there. I don't want to erase or format the failing disk partition until I am sure that I have recovered the data. My last hope is that I have another 1.5 TB hard drive; I could try to write the disk images to that partition before I format the old drive. But first, of course, I would need to backup materials from that drive, and now I am running out of space again. Bill P.S. And if things were not bad enough, the skies here in San Francisco are a muddy mixture of orange, black, brown and gray. At noon today, it looked like the middle of the night.