urgent: corrupt partition

fideli · 2004-10-25 15:21:45

hey everyone,

i have a corrupt partition. it won't physically mount anymore, and i desperately need to get some stuff off of it. i made a quick backup yesterday because i could sense this was happening (continuous grinding noises) but i was dumb enough to store the backup "temporarily" on the same partition. is there anything i can do just to grab that data? the filesystem was reiserfs. thanks.

afu · 2004-10-25 20:48:58

I doubt there is much that you can do. You might try mounting the bad partition with knoppix or a rescue disk just to try. Otherwise...

i3839 · 2004-10-25 22:51:04

Don't touch your hd, don't mount it. Then:

1) Download dd_rescue and make either a copy of your whole hd or of each partition (if the partition table can still be read). This should be the first moment that you touch the drive. Also, while doing the copy, if you get too many IO errors I recommend to shut down the pc and try it again later (possibly leaving a gap in the datafile). At least that worked for me with a totally broken hd that became hysterical if you tried reading too many bad blocks. Also don't put the broken hd on the same ATA cable with another device (precaution).

2) Now you have a backup of your drive, it doesn't matter if the hd becomes even more broken, so optionally you can fiddle with it, like trying to mount it or do other stuff directly on the drive.

3) Then do all the data rescuing stuff (like fsck.reiserfs) on the hd image file(s).

loveslave · 2004-11-20 12:19:45

i3839, thank you for your valuable info

i3839 · 2004-11-20 20:26:59

You're welcome. It's kinda weird (in a nice way) to get thanks from someone else than you seemed to help in the first place. :-)

khazdar · 2004-11-20 22:48:11

if all else fails, stick it in the freezer for a few hours. an ice cold hard drive can help if you've had a head crash...

-khaz

i3839 · 2004-11-20 23:19:11

Yes, I believe that can help a lot. A bad hd that I fiddled with would get sort of stuck in the groove caused by the head crash, turning off the pc and letting it cool down helped to get it running again (running in the sense that it can read again, instead of spitting IO errors all the time).

If there's someone else with some good advice about broken harddisks we have enough info to add this stuff on the wiki, if there's interest for that.

Arch Linux

#1 2004-10-25 15:21:45

urgent: corrupt partition

#2 2004-10-25 20:48:58

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

#3 2004-10-25 22:51:04

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

#4 2004-11-20 12:19:45

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

#5 2004-11-20 20:26:59

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

#6 2004-11-20 22:48:11

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

#7 2004-11-20 23:19:11

Re: urgent: corrupt partition

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