Mike, thanks for the suggestions. I figured I'd try one last thing -- I put the hard drive in the freezer for an hour or two.
Then I connected it with the external USB cage, and started e2fsck again. This time it got past the point where, last night, it hung. Now it is attempting to fix and clear inodes (of course, with a 500GB drive, even a SATA one, it's going to take some time). I'll update later, let you know if it did indeed fix anything or not. If I can't access the data after this, I'll attempt to run shred on the drive. I already have an RMA from Seagate; the warranty on the drive is good until something like 2013. So all I have to pay is postage to return it, and they'll send me a replacement. Note the replacement will be refurbished, but the remainder of the original warranty will still be in place. Not too bad, I think. t. On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 11:07 -0600, Mike Bigalke wrote: > A couple of suggestions: 1) Try adding a new partition to it. It need > not be big, say 4 gigs and try running Puppy Linux or some other small > distro on it. If this works, then I'd suspect a corrupt file system > on your 7.10 Ubuntu. And you might be able to access the files you > want. 2) If this doesn't work try reformatting the entire drive. Of > course, you have lost the files you are looking for if this is > successful. > > In any case don't toss the SATA drive until you reformat it. If there > was a sudden loss of power, even in a journalled system, it can > corrupt any open files, directories, system files, and even the ext3 > file system itself. > > > > On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Theresa Kehoe <t...@cablemo.net> wrote: > > On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 08:02 -0600, Robert Citek wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Theresa Kehoe > <t...@cablemo.net> wrote: > > > I was looking for the less obvious .. a 500GB SATA drive, > still under > > > warranty, no particular reason it should physically fail > just now. > > > > It's a numbers game. Let's say a company has a 90% success > rate with > > drives. It probably costs less to offer a warranty to > replaces those > > 10% than it does to improve the success rate to 99%. In > essence, the > > company is foregoing the cost of QA and shifting part of its > QC to its > > customers. > > > It's a Seagate 500GB SATA, and it comes with a five-year > warranty (which > is a fair bit more than the 1 to 3 year ones I usually come > across). > > I guess there's no rhyme or reason to why it failed exactly > now. I'm > just glad that all my critical data is backed up, and most of > the > non-critical stuff. > > I did get it to mount -- however, now running e2fsck freezes > up at the > same point each time: > > Group 3112's inode table at 101974045 conflicts with some > other fs > block. > Relocate? yes > > and it just hangs there (for over 2 hours, last night). > > If I try to mount the drive and look at it, this is what I > see: > > :/media/disk# ls -la > ls: cannot access var: Input/output error > ls: cannot access etc: Input/output error > ls: cannot access media: Input/output error > ls: cannot access bin: Input/output error > ls: cannot access boot: Input/output error > ls: cannot access dev: Input/output error > ls: cannot access home: Input/output error > ls: cannot access initrd: Input/output error > ls: cannot access lib: Input/output error > ls: cannot access mnt: Input/output error > ls: cannot access opt: Input/output error > ls: cannot access proc: Input/output error > ls: cannot access root: Input/output error > ls: cannot access sbin: Input/output error > ls: cannot access srv: Input/output error > ls: cannot access sys: Input/output error > ls: cannot access tmp: Input/output error > ls: cannot access usr: Input/output error > ls: cannot access lib64: Input/output error > total 24 > drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2008-11-28 10:00 . > drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2009-03-03 22:54 .. > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? bin > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? boot > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 2008-01-25 15:51 cdrom -> > media/cdrom > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? dev > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? etc > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? home > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? initrd > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 2008-11-28 10:00 initrd.img -> > boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-16-generic > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 2008-06-20 08:42 initrd.img.old > -> > boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-15-generic > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? lib > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? lib64 > drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-01-25 15:51 lost+found > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? media > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? mnt > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? opt > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? proc > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? root > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? sbin > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? srv > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? sys > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? tmp > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? usr > ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? var > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 2008-11-28 10:00 vmlinuz -> > boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-16-generic > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 2008-06-20 08:42 vmlinuz.old -> > boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-15-generic > > It isn't even a huge amount of files I'm trying to recover > (the last few > months of entries in my gardening log and cookbook are all, > really, plus > some work on an application I've been doing for ByteWorks -- I > have the > backup, just not the work of the past two weeks) ... it just > bugs me, I > guess. > > Theresa > > > > Regards, > > - Robert > > > > > > > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: cwelug@googlegroups.com To subscribe: cwelug-subscr...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe: cwelug-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
