I've been able to recover most of my data from the damaged partition. I did this by using ddrescue to create an image of the partition, then mounted the partition. Initially I tried to create the image on an NFS share residing on my server - but NFS was giving me a "File exceeds maximum size" type of error when the file got larger than 2 GB. Rather than fighting with this, I just put a spare drive into the box as a slave, and created the image there. Once the image was done (LOOONG process), I mounted the image and then copied my files to another drive. Some files were damaged and reported "permission errors" during the copy process, and the files were removed from the directory listing after this message. Luckily the files I consider most critical seem to be intact.
Here's a little more detailed process: 1. # install ddrescue (or just use[b]dd[/b] if you understand the commands/options there) 2. ddrescue /dev/hda4 hda4backup #hda4backup is the image file - I had previously cd'd into the target directory) 3. # wait - I was creating a 51GB image, this naturally takes some time.... 4. mount -o loop hda4backup /someMountPoint 5 cp -r /someMountPoint/* /dirOnOtherDrive The real question is why did this partition go kaput in the first place. I don't have any definite answers, but seeing as a bunch of bad blocks are being reported on that partition, this might just be a drive failure - possibly caused by excess heat (I need to improve airflow around my drive tray). I'll be formatting the suspect partition later to see if the drive is still useful. Regardless, I'll also be starting a new Gentoo installation on a different drive this weekend.... <sighs> another 48 hours gone waiting for KDE to compile... :) Thanks for the support! Shawn On Saturday 16 July 2005 01:15, Shawn wrote: > Thanks for the support guys. > > The partition definetly looks damaged. Using ddrescue, I'm seeing ~30 > errors within 2 MB of data. Unfortunately, the local drive doesn't have > the capacity to backup the damaged partition, so I mounted an NFS share on > my server that does have the capacity, and pointed the output of ddrescue > there. But, I guess I don't have NFS configured properly as I can transfer > only 2 MB before getting a "File exceeds maximum size" type error... I've > just finished putting a spare 80GB drive in the box to take care of this > problem... _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
