I have a hard drive that sort of died recently. For the most part it was working normally but whenever I tried to "cd /" it would stall for a long period of time. This got worse and worse until I finally made a fatal mistake.... Not suspecting the drive was the problem and in a moment of weakness I decided to reboot to try and fix the problem... It never worked again... I will attribute my poor judgement to having spent so much time in the past working with "other" OSes where rebooting is your main trouble-shooting tool. Sometimes you have uncontrolled flash-backs and fall into old habits... That being said, while I do have backups of all my most critical items there was some other things I wouldn't mind recovering if possible. The drive is still recognized in the BIOS etc. but it simply won't mount under linux. Error is: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc1, or too many mounted file systems I've also tried mount with the "mount -o sb=xxx" option specifying some alternative superblocks as determined by calling "mke2fs -n /dev/hdc1" all to no avail. Seems likely that the drive is 100% dead at this point but if anyone has any tricks they could pass along I'd like to give them a whirl. I didn't find much by the way of google. Very much appreciate if anyone has any ideas. On an entirely related note, does anyone have a good script (possibly using rsync) for keeping files up-to-date between a desktop and a laptop by way of a central server ? Thanks. -- John Lange BigHostBox.com (204) 885 0872
"John" == John Lange <john.lange@bighostbox.com> writes:
John> On an entirely related note, does anyone have a good script John> (possibly using rsync) for keeping files up-to-date between John> a desktop and a laptop by way of a central server ? Hey John, you might want to have a look at a version control system such as subversion or cvs. That way, you get the version management as well, so you can back up over mangled or altered files. There was an older (year or two) article in the Linux Journal too, which may be on-line. In it, the author had placed his whole home directory in CVS. Cheers, Tim
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, John Lange wrote:
Very much appreciate if anyone has any ideas.
I have heard (but never tried) that freezing the drive works on stuck heads and other mechanical problems.
On an entirely related note, does anyone have a good script (possibly using rsync) for keeping files up-to-date between a desktop and a laptop by way of a central server ?
I'm currently reading "Linux Server Hacks" from O'Reilly, which has a few hacks on various scenarios like yours. Might be worth a look. Sean -- Sean A. Walberg <sean@ertw.com> http://www.ertw.com
Thanks to everyone that replied with suggestions. Great response! I've never heard of the freezer thing before. I'm going to give it a whirl! If I manage to recover anything I'll be sure to inform the group what I've learned. Merry Christmas everyone. Regards, -- John Lange BigHostBox.com (204) 885 0872 On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 08:05, Sean A. Walberg wrote:
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, John Lange wrote:
Very much appreciate if anyone has any ideas.
I have heard (but never tried) that freezing the drive works on stuck heads and other mechanical problems.
On an entirely related note, does anyone have a good script (possibly using rsync) for keeping files up-to-date between a desktop and a laptop by way of a central server ?
I'm currently reading "Linux Server Hacks" from O'Reilly, which has a few hacks on various scenarios like yours. Might be worth a look.
Sean
Hello, I have had some success recovering data from a bad hard drive using a program called 'dd_rescue' (find it here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) which is basically like 'dd' but will continue copying even if there are bad blocks (by skipping them). So you may be able to make a mountable disk image of your drive (assuming the mechanical parts still work well enough to copy enough data), though you may have to 'fsck' the image. It is important to note that "forcing" the drive to continue to read when there are errors has the potential to cause even greater damage to the drive. Jeff Green On December 19, 2003 05:47 pm, John Lange wrote:
Thanks to everyone that replied with suggestions. Great response!
I've never heard of the freezer thing before. I'm going to give it a whirl! If I manage to recover anything I'll be sure to inform the group what I've learned.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Regards,
Well let me just say that an ENORMOUS blue ribbon goes out to Jeff Green for his suggestion of using dd_rescue! It's taken me a few days to run through the entire process (mostly because I've been preoccupied with family Christmas activities) of recovering my old hard disk but dd_rescue did the trick! After letting dd_rescue run (it took a long time) I then ran fsck -y on the new image (which also took a long time) and was able to mount the drive! At first I was dismayed because the new drive image was empty except lost+found. But lost+found had loads of stuff and I was eventually able to locate my old home directory and copy out the files I was looking for! woohoo! I never did have to resort to the "drive in the freezer trick" but thanks to everyone who made suggestions and as I said, the biggest thanks to Jeff Green! Merry Christmas! -- John Lange BigHostBox.com (204) 885 0872 On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 08:32, Jeff Green wrote:
Hello,
I have had some success recovering data from a bad hard drive using a program called 'dd_rescue' (find it here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) which is basically like 'dd' but will continue copying even if there are bad blocks (by skipping them). So you may be able to make a mountable disk image of your drive (assuming the mechanical parts still work well enough to copy enough data), though you may have to 'fsck' the image. It is important to note that "forcing" the drive to continue to read when there are errors has the potential to cause even greater damage to the drive.
Jeff Green
On December 19, 2003 05:47 pm, John Lange wrote:
Thanks to everyone that replied with suggestions. Great response!
I've never heard of the freezer thing before. I'm going to give it a whirl! If I manage to recover anything I'll be sure to inform the group what I've learned.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Regards,
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participants (4)
-
Jeff Green -
John Lange -
Sean A. Walberg -
Tim Lavoie