Rog, Definitely give Spinrite a shot.
I just recovered a 12x500GB software RAID 5 array after loosing 2 drives. I'm not 100% sure what happened to the 2 bad drives. I believe that one had a physical failure and the other suffered from a URE during the rebuild or hardware failure as well. In any case I copied the two bad drives to two new drives. One at at time. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc,noerror Both reported i/o errors for the dd/copy but it continued despite them. Took almost 24 hours each drive. Once I got mdadm to sync all the drives in the RAID I still had to rebuild the SuperBlock and then run fsck with --scan-whole-partition --rebuild-tree for about 18 hours before I was finally able to mount it. In any case just simply copying it to another drive might give you the opportunity to recover the data. Of course if the disk is failing to spin/needle not reading you might just need professional recovery services. -chris On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Manny <vector...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dido on spinrite. I use version 6.0 which is the latest. It'll even > work with some usb external drives. Depends if the os needs to mount > a usb driver or it's supported through the bios. > > Don't use it if your drive is dying from physical damage, i.e. bad > servo motor or actuator. Spinrite has a tendency to overheat drives > due to so much thrashing of the heads. So make sure it's in a nice > cool environment. > --Manny > > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Jeff Lasman <jpli...@nobaloney.net> wrote: >> On Monday 16 February 2009 12:59 pm, David Kaiser wrote: >> >>> I used to use Spinrite version 5 or something back in the early to >>> mid 90's. It was able to recover almost every bad block (we used to >>> say bad sector back then) >> >> The most recent version is 4-1/2 years old: >> >> http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm >> >>> I can't use Spinrite anymore because it won't work with IDE or SATA >>> drives, it only worked with drives where it could directly access the >>> drive - no translation like IDE or SATA put on top of the physical >>> drive. >> >> According to the page cited above, it should work; it uses MSDOS or >> FreeDOS. The way it works is it picks up data that's only marginally >> readable; it keeps retrying until it gets it, and then it writes it >> down again. Supposedly that's supposed to fix drives. >> >> Jeff >> -- >> Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services >> P.O. Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 >> Our jplists address used on lists is for list email only >> voice: +1 951 643-5345, or see: >> "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"; >> _______________________________________________ >> LinuxUsers mailing list >> LinuxUsers@socallinux.org >> http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers >> > _______________________________________________ > LinuxUsers mailing list > LinuxUsers@socallinux.org > http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers >
