I'm getting the dreaded "ad1s1a: hard error reading fsbn 524543 of 96-127 (ad1s1 bn 524543; cn 520 tn 6 sn 5) status=59 error=40" errors. Based on what I've read, it means my drive's going bye-bye. As it is, it won't even boot - fortunately I have another FBSD drive to boot from, and I get these errors while trying fsck it. Shame on me for not noticing the errors sooner and an even bigger shame for not having a proper backup.
In any case, the milk is spilled and I need to mop it up as best I can. While I can mount the partition, I can't cd to it (more "hard errors..."), and since fsck isn't apparently helping, what can I do to recover what's left? I'm thinking dd's the tool to use, but I'm not really sure how to go about it. Here's what I get when I try to read from the beginning on the partition: # dd if=/dev/ad1s1a bs=64k dd: /dev/ad1s1a: Input/output error However, when I add "skip=1", the drive spits back data. That leads me to believe that if I skip over the bad sectors, I can read what's left. I've got a spare drive I can use as a sandbox, but how should I dump the data? Should I label the second drive with the same partition size and "dd if=/dev/ad1s1a of=/dev/ad2s1a"? Is there any chance of recovering filesystem data going this route? Or should I just create a new, empty partition and dump everything from the bad drive into a huge file and sift through it manually? This doesn't appeal to me at all, but there's a few pieces of data on this whose loss appeals even less. Help and/or suggestions are most definitely appreciated. Brad Waite _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"