On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 11:11:17AM +0530, Girish Venkatachalam wrote:
> I hate to say it but I am sure your hard disk is dying. Replace it ASAP

No no, that's all right. Death is an inevitable part of life. I know the
disk is dying and I'm going to replace it (or just throw away the
machine which is a piece of junk anyway) but I'd love to get out of it
the amendments to it's last will before it passes out completely.

When a NON-ENCRYPTED disk has damaged areas one may still be able to
access the undamaged areas upon a reboot - possibly by mounting it as a
secondary disk on a working system and using various recovery tools,
etc.

However: the last time I had an ENCRYPTED disk with damaged areas, the
whole disk got rendered useless. It wouldn't respond to
keydisk/passphrase and hence there was no way to access "undamaged"
data.

The machine is still powered on. It still return ping but not ssh. When
typing on the keyboard, characters get echo'ed on the screen. Do I have
any options besides rebooting and praying?

> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Erling Westenvik
> <erling.westen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have an old laptop configured with softraid encryption using a USB
> > keydisk. The machine was never intended to be used for anything more
> > than just testing. However, I started putting a few cvs repositories
> > on it and slowly the machine became somewhat important.
> >
> > Today, when doing a cvs import of a little programming project on my
> > web server, the ssh connection died in the middle of the transfer. I
> > have not tried to restart it. This is whats on the screen right now.
> >
> > -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> > 3187832; cn 820 tn 230 sn 42), retrying
> > wd0: transfer error, downgrading to Ultra-DMA mode 4
> > wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 4
> > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890352 of 6890352-6890479
> > (wd0 bn 1 3187832; cn 820 tn 230 sn 42), retrying
> > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890391 of 6890352-6890479
> > (wd0 bn 1 3187871; cn 820 tn 231 sn 18), retrying
> > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890391 of 6890352-6890479
> > (wd0 bn 1 3187871; cn 820 tn 231 sn 18), retrying
> > softraid0: i/o error on block 6890352
> > -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> >
> > Kind of self explaining: old machine with faulty disk! I do have backups
> > but would like to have a copy of some recent commits.
> >
> > Switching console gives me a login prompt but after entering a user name
> > and pressing enter the machine just hangs. The machine will answer to
> > ping but not ssh.
> >
> > My question is:
> >
> > Do I have any options other than trying to reboot? Optionally into
> > single user mode?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Erling

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