Re: hard drive repair problem
On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 12:35:30PM -0400, Marty Landman wrote:
> At 11:40 AM 6/5/2006, Digby Tarvin wrote:
>
> >Sounds more like a hardware fault than a filesystem corruption to me.
>
> I was afraid of that.
>
> >Have you checked to see if anything is being logged by the driver
> >(eg by checking the output of 'dmesg')?
>
> Yes, dmesg shows the same thing that fsck does
>
> i.e.
>
> penskefile:/home/marty# dmesg | tail
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 56
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119,
> high=0, low=119, sector=40
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 40
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119,
> high=0, low=119, sector=48
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 48
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119,
> high=0, low=119, sector=56
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 56
> penskefile:/home/marty#
>
>
> >If it really is a filesystem corruption, then you should be able to dd
> >the entire content of the partition to /dev/null without any errors
> >being reported.
>
> Ok does this result indicate a hardware error then?
>
> penskefile:/home/marty# dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/null
> dd: reading `/dev/hdb1': Input/output error
> 40+0 records in
> 40+0 records out
> 20480 bytes transferred in 4.123283 seconds (4967 bytes/sec)
> penskefile:/home/marty#
I am afraid so. At a minimum, you have a bad sector at a critical
place in the filesystem which fsck is unable to deal with. But it
may be a failed head or worse, meaning that you will have lost
much if not all of the data beyond the first 20K of your partition.
If you have valuable data that is not backed up, try using the
'skip=blocks' option on dd to jump further into the partition
to see if the disk is good once you are beyond the initial
fault region. If that is the case, somebody sufficiently
familiar with ext3 might be able to suggest some more advanced
recovery tools that will be able to pull data off the drive.
But whatever happens, if I were you I would be planning on buying
a replacement drive and reaching for the backups.
For what it is worth - if a drive (or any piece of hardware for that
matter) is going to fail, during a power cycle is one of the most
likely times for it to happen, especially through a power outage
where the mains can spike and go up and down in a very hardware
unfriendly manner. A UPS and line filter is probably a good
investment if you have to leave a machine running unattended.
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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