Hi John,
On 2006.06.02, at 1:57 AM, John Brahy wrote:
For a couple weeks I was running without backups and one of the
drives died.
Is there a way to recover any of the data from the drives?
How dead is the drive and how desperate are you?
I have imaged a clients ide drive which was doing the "spin-up and
keep spinning for a few minutes and then spin-down", thing. The slow
disk death where you get excited about copying your data, then it
dies mid-copy, you try lots of times to copy, it does the same thing
each time and then the drive eventually never spins up again.
What I did in that case, was image with Ghost and when the drive
spins-down, pull the power plug on the drive alone, then plug it back
in to get a few more minutes of copying. Keep doing that until the
whole drive is imaged. Thankfully, this worked perfectly for me.
I only mention Ghost because I have only tried this with Ghost and
Ghost did actually tolerate this abuse and patiently waited for the
drive to become responsive again and then continued. I don't know if
this would work with other imaging type software. Seems scary, so I
suppose if you want to try this you should do it on an expendable PC
or perhaps an external enclosure. Ghost has a "forensic" option where
it copies all data regardless of partition types and file-systems,
which you'll need in this case since Ghost knows nothing about FFS
and even if it did, it's striped.
If you manage to get a full image, get an exact same drive and
restore the image to it, then you might get lucky.
Another thing I have seen successfully done when a drive would not
spin-up at all, was a PCB swap from an exact same drive (model/
firmware). If you try this, image the drive and then restore to
another disk. Since when I saw this done, the newly fixed drive with
different PCB died only days later in the same way. As if something
inside the drive killed something on the outer PCB.
Good luck, I hope you have some option.
Shane
