Hi Raja, Thanks very much for your detailed response. I will keep your suggestions in mind.
On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Raja Subramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Arun Khan <[email protected]> wrote: >> I have an external WD 1TB hard disk with a XFS file system. It used >> to be mounted to my desktop via an e-sata port on the mobo. > ... >> Anyway, I have hooked up the 1TB device to my temporary desktop via >> USB and the kernel is not reporting any error. >> >> However, there are file system errors and it refuses to mount. >> >> Using SystemRescueCD I have tried to repair the FS with the following: >> >> xfs_repair -v -L /dev/sdf1 > > XFS fsck requires a LOT of RAM to check large file systems. Please > ensure you have at least 2GB of RAM on your system and are running > a 64bit kernel and userland. It's also good to have adequate swap > mounted -- you don't want xfs_check to run out of RAM midway. Yes, I am using 64bit kernel with 8GB RAM. I am using SystemRescueCD. Memory was not the issue; top showed only 670MB in use. > I always "xfs_check" first to identify errors. Then try a dry run with > "xfs_repair -n" before turning xfs_repair loose. > > >> I see no output on the console (even after letting it run for a couple >> of hours) and I am unable to break out of the session (Cntrl-C). > It turns out I was overly optimistic about the condition of the hard disk. Although, it showed no disk read errors last night, they showed up today when I was attempting yet another "xfs_repair" with the -P option. This time around I did get some output on the console with it aborting on disk I/O error. Time to RMA the disk to WDC. In this case, the files were mostly ISO of various distros so not much loss. > USB is very slow, so a lot of patience is required :-) Or hook up the > HDD to your internal SATA controller and rerun fsck. I do not have any spare sata ports on the server and esata port either. > xfs_repair is probably stuck on kernel IO so Control-C is not stopping > it. If you don't see any disk activity, it should be safe to reboot the box > and try the above. > > >> I have also done ddrescue to extract about 150GB of the FS and try to >> repair the extracted file - no success. > > Do you have a full image of the XFS partition? What is the size of your > XFS partition. The partition size is the full disk - around 976GB. I do not have an equivalent spare so I tried about 150GB and tried mounting the image file - did not work. Clutching at straws before letting it go :( > If you have LVM setup, suggest that you create a snapshot before running > xfs_* so you can revert in case things do not go as planned. > > > Not to discourage you but my experience in recovering XFS has mostly met > with limited success. xfs_repair renames the files with their inode numbers > and generally creates a mess. I've often had to reinstall IRIX after > a file system > corruption. With this experience, I agree with your suggestion re. file system choice. I too have had very limited success with XFS repair on another occasion and ended up reformatting the volume. -- Arun Khan _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
