I have a hard drive which has failed. I posted about it here[1], and
was referred to ddrescue[2] to create an image of the failed disk.
This was successful, and I now have an image of the drive, including
the 1688 bad sectors that couldn't be read. The logfile lists all the
the bad sectors, and I was referred to these[3] instructions to
convert the bad sector numbers into filenames that are corrupted.
Unfortunately, those instructions involve debugfs, which is
ext2/ext3-specific. What little information I was able to find online
about the icheck and ncheck commands used in the instructions and
ReiserFS has led me to either complaints that they are not implemented
for ReiserFS, or some variant of a post[4] to this mailing list that
suggests using 'find / -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \;' at
watching for the filenames that fail.
That seems like a complete brute force method (scanning over 110GB to
locate 800kB of bad data!), and will almost certainly return
inaccurate results because the drive is continuing to fail and will
return more problems than it experienced initially when the drive
image was made. (Not to mention stress the disk further and make any
more work I may need to do on it more difficult.)
Is there any way to do the equivalent of icheck or ncheck in ReiserFS?
If not now, are there plans to implement this functionality anytime
soon?
[1] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=485322
[2] http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/ddrescue/
[3] http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt
[4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=114425109321290&w=2
