I have a recently failed OS boot hard drive (2TB OS & data disk). My data is backed up, but I wanted to recall the directory structure.
I mounted the data partition and began to copy a few key directories over to another drive. I noticed the transfer speed is all over the place, but mostly 0 bytes/sec.
Every few tens of seconds there would be a spurt of transfers approaching many megabytes per second, then kilobytes/sec, then nothing. A few seconds later, another burst.
After awhile, many of my files were showing up and when I opened them (images), they were perfect – no problems.
What is the drive doing that makes it so slow even though the superblock and filesystem were repaired? Just curious how it is managing to copy.
(I just assumed the data would be no good. What a surprise.)