Message-ID: <46868314.70903@solidonline.dk> Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:21:40 +0200 From: Sylvester Lykkehus User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 (X11/20070604) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: opensuse-offtopic@opensuse.org Subject: A story about HDD recovery with dd_rescue Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Warning: Long text, Spoiler: I got my data out, and I'm happy -- Hello list, I wanted to share a little story about how my disk died, and how my data was recovered with dd_rescue (and a lot of time). Couple of days ago, when I got home from work, I began noticing a sound from my computer case. It was very systematic, about once every 15 minutes, and sounded like a hdd going into sleep mode, or being turned off. Little did I know, that this was my old IBM disk taking it's last breaths of life. I checked my system logs, but nothing indicated anything wrong at this time. I thought perhaps the last update I did, might have enabled some suspend mode for the disk which I was not aware off. It was hard to locate the disk from were the sound occurred, since all 4 of my disk sits into an single (un)mountable disk bay. I decided to turn of the PC and "spread" the disks out, to locate the one making the noise. This was perhaps a mistake. I booted my system, only to be overwhelmed of the amount of Seek/Buffer/IO error (and even more noise) aimed at my old IBM disk, which I had been using to store my documents, school papers, assignments etc., "Argh!". Well, at least, the problem and the disk was now located. Boldly, I went ahead, and tried mounting the drive anyway, but the system (and the filesystem (reiserfs)), complained even more. At that point I heard the first "Klonk!". This was going to be a familiar sound, over the next few days. My best guess is that the drive locked up mechanically, completely stopping the system from communicating with the drive. I decided to move the disk to an USB case, to more easily recover from the "Klonk!" mishaps, by turning the USB case on/off, instead of rebooting every time. Next, the drive spun up, I mounted it, filesystem was inconsistent, superblock damaged, reiserfs stat data damaged, and yet I was able to mount the partition. Occasionally system complained about Buffer I/O errors, but I could still access my data. For about 2 minutes that is. "Klonk!". Repeat, copy some files to a sane drive. "Klonk!". I tried to dd the drive to an image as well, with the same results. This was going to take a while. I decided to stop there, instead of harming the disk even more, by the repeatedly power cycling. I spend the rest of the day searching the internet for information on how to recover from DEAD drives, but most of the information found was aimed at filesystem crashes/inconsistency. I did however find a cool site, debunking some myths about how to "repair" broken disks. That includes freezing/heating/dropping/tapping the disk (which I was actually desperate enough to try), but the article convinced me not to do that just yet. The next day, I went to work, thinking about my data, which were probably intact, stuck inside a broken drive. I admit, I used some time at work to search for solutions as well. And I found one. dd_rescue was made for this purpose, and was there for the, well, rescue. After work, I hooked up the drive, started to dd_rescue the partition to an image, waited for the "Klonk!", and noted the position it was stuck at. Next, I power cycled the disk, instructed dd_rescue to continue from the before noted position, and waited for the next "Klonk!". I repeated this step 76 times (according to my noted positions), and ended up with a perfectly (although unclean) valid 60GB image of the entire partition. Now was the time for reiserfsck to do it's magic. I have used this utility to recover from bad partitions (and sometime dumb "rm -rf") before. I did a --rebuild-tree on the image, mounted it, and behold; my data was recovered (or rescued). All my school papers, holiday photos, etc. was in perfect condition. I was _very_ happy, and very impressed by the tools available. As I mentioned, I have used reiserfsck before, and I am aware that sometimes it leaves you with broken files on the partition. I had a few music files on the partition as well, and though most of them were in mint condition, some was harmed, either by read errors on the drive, or reiserfsck trying to recover earlier versions of the file, and leaves you with garbage. But who cares, my documents were intact, and I owe that to dd_rescue and reiserfs. The disk is now a nice paperweight. I apologize if anyone was bothered by this long post, as I said, I just wanted to share my little experience with you. Best regards Sylvester Lykkehus (translated to english, that would be "happyhouse", which describes my mood just fine right now :-))