Re: help

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

Hi,

sounds like your hard disks are dying (I'm not sure about this, though).
You should really backup your data regularly, anyhow, it is too late
now, but you should do so in future.

If you really need your data, it seems to be a good choice to pay
someone with experience in this area to rescue your data. If you really
want to try this yourself (doing things wrong further worsens the
situation, you have been warned), here is a quick summary of a possible
way of proceeding:

 1. Check the self monitoring of the hard disks using 'smartctl -a
    /dev/whatever' and if there is anything suspicious, turn the server
    off immediately. If your server is already turned off, check the
    hard disk's self monitoring after step 5.

 2. Buy an external hard drive that is larger than your current ones.

 3. Go to http://grml.org/download/ and download the grml rescue/live
    CD.

 4. Burn the image to a CD-ROM or create a bootable USB device
    containing the image.

 5. Boot your server using this CD-ROM, using 'forensic' as boot
    parameter. This boot parameter is important to avoid writing to the
    possibly dying harddisks.

 6. Try to create a image of the old harddisks on the new harddisk.
    http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue describes a tool that is
    able to do such things (should be installed on the grml CD by default).
    If you mix up device numbers, which could be different now, you
    could overwrite the data you want to rescue, so be careful.

 7. Turn the server off, since you continue rescuing on a different
    computer.

 8. Create an additional copy of the images you created. Everything you
    do from now on must happen on the copies to avoid changing the image
    you created.

 9. Now you can do things like running fsck, mounting the image and so
    on. To access partitions on the image you can use kpartx (if you
    created images of the partitions instead of the hard disk you don't
    need kpartx, but creating an image of the hard disks is less error
    prone).

Since you never did something like this before, you should experiment
with the tools before doing what I described above, or even better: let
someone with experience in this area do it ...

Regards
Carsten