@ghostdancer no end yet. Don't know where you left off, but in short: failing drive copied to new one with ddrescue; now using that to copy to from my old Photos drive (that's nowhere near finished yet). did e2fsck with read-write test for badblocks and produced list of bad blocks after that (dumpe2fs). then I applied scrub to the device (not fs) to overwrite it with several patterns. next step: run (directly) badblocks on it (specified same block size as other runs), testing also read-write (that will do 4 patterns), and writing directly to bad blocks list - this is now on the read&compare phase of the first pattern. From the first ddrescue I also have (indirectly) a 'lsit' of bad blocks from its reports. So I'll end up with 3 lists of bad blocks which I'll use to decide what to do after that... more (motivation) in recent dents. :)