hard disk crash

[linux r]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:22:34 +0200, Emiliano Brunetti
<emiliano.brunetti at fastwebnet.it> wrote:
> Hi everybody.
> 
> I am running FC1 and one of my hdd crashed: i can't even mount it.
> 
> It is a reiser partition on a 70Gb SCSI disk. I tried with reiserfsck
> --rebuild-tree -S /dev/sdc1 - after waiting for a long time, looked like
> it had fixed something. However, i still can't mount the partition.
> Mount reports some errors (sorry, can't be more specific right now, but
> it is the usual error - unable to mount, bad superblock or too many
> mounted file system...).
> 
> So i tried with reiserfsck --rebuild-sb /dev/sdc1, that didn't work.
> 
> So i tried with the scsi adapter utility and verified media. Looks like
> some sectors are indeed damaged, and the verify utility claimed it was
> able to flag them as corrupted and make the disk usable again.
> 
> It didn't work either.
> 
> Now, i'd like to save all that i can from that disk, and then i'd try to
> format and see if i can recover it. However, i can't even mount it so i
> really don't know what to do. I read somewhere that i could try to 'dd
> if=/dev/sdc1 of=/dev/newparition', and also that it is supposed to work
> even with unmounted partition. Anybody tried this out? ANy hints? I
> wonder why i am not able to mount the partition if reiserfsck
> --rebuild-sb says that the superblock is good.
> 
> Thanks a lot.
> 
> E.
> 
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
> 

How much ram do you have on the box?  Reiser should be better than
that, I am surprised.  One method would be to look at it forensically.
1.  Pretend your main one is the 'suspect' disk.  

2.  Are you able to mount it from Knoppix or another distro?  Use
knoppix to boot up and dd an entire copy of the drive (with this size
it might take awhile but this is a sound method if you have the time
for it to run).

3.  dd it to another removable device, preferably another (USB
external) hard drive so that you don't run into weird geometry issues
or other time consuming things.

4.  Now that you have another copy you can truly play around with
other stuff.   It may be that you can recover more than you think
because of the fact that you will be on a ramdrive and _some_ of the
files  that may otherwise be lost, will <possibly> be in ram.  Maybe a
bad sector on the disk only happenned to have a few files on that
spot.  If that were the case, then you would be lucky and only maybe
lose a small amount of data.

5.  Try fsck and some of the same commands, now with the new drive and
see what it does with the same files on the NEW drive.

6.  Now that you  have two copies, you can run other tools, etc. 
Maybe on the COPY you can play around with fdisk and get it bootable. 
The way I would approach it would be to try to get as much as I can,
even if it is only half of the data lets say it is a start.

HTH
-- 
Marc




Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. 
Ayn Rand