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.
I tried ... but the system was unable to even detect a hard drive (from Ubuntu Server 8.10 recovery mode, it asked me to select a driver for the device, as it couldn't figure out what it was). Likewise, trying to do a new install on the device would fail out when it got to the point of taking a look at the existing partitions. Couldn't run e2fsck, couldn't mount the device, got "Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open", alternating with "Filesystem revision too high while trying to open". Last step, tried to run "shred" to absolutely make sure no one else could recover my data, either, before returning the drive. Shred ran for about 7 hours before I noticed that the process wasn't advancing any further. The hard disk was physically so hot to the touch it was uncomfortable to handle it. So I went ahead and packed it back up to return it to Seagate. I am just very glad that the timing worked out the way it did -- I had decided to build myself a new system; had gotten it built, installed, and probably 95% + of my data migrated, *before* my old hard drive decided to go "shake-n-bake". (oh yeah, if you move the hard drive it makes a 'plink' kind of sound ... not good, methinks) > 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. The thing is, when I use the external drive cage, I plug the power adapter in to the APC, just because power in my neighborhood has been known to do wonky things at times (as the frequent beeps we hear from our various battery backup units indicates). I couldn't reformat it, couldn't even finish a shred on it -- but the first 57GB of 500GB did get shredded, and I figure that on top of the broken superblock and messed up file system means that recovering any data off that hard drive is very unlikely. So if nothing else, I learned lots about methods to try and access a borked-up filesystem. Thanks for all the input and suggestions, guys. t. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
