Re: How to recover a damaged partition

[Joseph Loo <jloo20111002@gmail.com>]

On 01/21/2015 06:53 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I'm working with new 4TB drives, and one of them just had a bad spot in
> a fairly awkward place.
> The very first block of an ext4 partition was unreadable, and caused
> problems in booting, as well as anything else that wanted to scan
> partitions.
>
> I overwrote the first 4K with zeroes, deleted the partition (with gdisk)
> and created a new unformatted partition to cover the area.  Now that
> partition passes a read test, and I'm checking the other partitions.
>
> The damaged partition has been inactive for a while, so I'm quite sure I
> have adequate backups.  But now seems to be a time for me to learn --
> lots of things have been going wrong, and I've been learning how to cope.
>
> So I wonder if there's a way to get that partition back, at least in
> part, without using my backups.
>
> Any hints, pointers, tutorials, or opinions welcome.
>
> --
> Kevin O'Gorman
> #define QUESTION ((bb) || (!bb))   /* Shakespeare */
>
> 	Please consider the environment before printing this email.
Have you tried doing a badblocks on the partition. This will try reading 
and writing data to the partition to check the disk drive. I generally 
do this on my drive before deploying. It tends to remove the bad blocks.

You can also try grc's Spinrite (cost money) at grc.com

--
Joseph Loo
jloo@acm.org