To be honest George I would start with testdisk. This can search you entire 
drive a re-discover what partition data it can. As well as confirm the 
existence of an LVM partition. Maybe to that then post the results, or jump in 
IRC?

Simon Vass
Technical Manager
E-Tech Uganda Ltd
http://www.etech.ug
Tel: +256 (0) 312260620 or (0) 312260621
Email: [email protected]



----- Original Message -----
From: "George Lule" <[email protected]>
To: "Linux Users Group Uganda" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, 26 November, 2009 14:46:08 GMT +03:00 Iraq
Subject: Re: [LUG] Are these drives gone?


Dear Chris 
smartctl -A /dev/sda1 produces an output similar to the one I gave earlier 
apart from line 6, 7 and the last line . See below 

<start errors> 


usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 121 
sda: Unit Not Ready, sense: 
current 00:00 sns = 70 2 
ASC=3a, ASCQ=0 
Raw sense data: 0x70 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x02 0x0a 0x3a 
sda: READ CAPACITY failed 
sda: status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 00 
sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB. 
sda: Write Protect is off 
I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0 
ldm_validate_partition_table(): Disk read failed. 
I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0 
unable to read partition table 
Drive Command Successful self test aborted 


</end errors> 

Bernard, 
dmesg |more is full of repeats of the above message and so is the output from 
fdisk -l !! Weird :-( 


Simon, 
1. No, the machine wasn't backed up, no not even the metadata of the drive. 
Actually, its the one I was attempting to rebuild when I came across that 
error. 
2. Hmmmm, can I mount a drive that even fdisk can't show as exisiting? Advise 
please. 


Regards 
George 


On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Simon Vass < [email protected] > wrote: 


Dear George, 

LVM drives are a little different to normal partitioned drives. Funnily enough 
an having the same issue with one of mine. You first have to mount them with 
the lvm tools before scanning. Have you done this? Did you have a backup of the 
machine, and more importantly the meta data for the lvm drive? 



Simon Vass 
Technical Manager 
E-Tech Uganda Ltd 
http://www.etech.ug 
Tel: +256 (0) 312260620 or (0) 312260621 
Email: [email protected] 






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bernard Wanyama" < [email protected] > 
To: "Chris Wilson" < [email protected] > 
Cc: "Linux Users Group Uganda" < [email protected] > 
Sent: Thursday, 26 November, 2009 13:25:11 GMT +03:00 Iraq 
Subject: Re: [LUG] Are these drives gone? 

Hi George, 

Have you tried the following commands: 

fdisk -l 
dmesg | more 

should give you some idea of what the system can or cannot see in 
terms of storage devices and error messages. 

As Chris suggested, smartctl will also give you an idea of how to proceed. 

Kind regards, 
Bernard 

2009/11/26 Chris Wilson < [email protected] >: 
> On Thu, 26 Nov 2009, George Lule wrote: 
> 
>> Dear all,I am trying to recover data from (of course) a failed system. 
>> According to the resident guy, system was running Fedora Core 4, LVM 
>> with 2 SATA drives each 300GB. However when I try to scan them mdadm 
>> --examine --scan /dev/sda1 >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf or when I try to 
>> fdisk them, fdisk /dev/sda1 I get the errors 
>> 
>> <start errors> 
>> 
>> usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 121 
>> sda: Unit Not Ready, sense: 
>> current 00:00 sns = 70 2 
>> ASC=3a, ASCQ=0 
>> Raw sense data: 0x70 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x02 0x0a 0x3a 
>> sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB. 
>> sda: Write Protect is off 
>> I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0 
>> ldm_validate_partition_table(): Disk read failed. 
>> I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0 
>> unable to read partition table 
>> 
>> </end errors> 
>> 
>> Please note that am doing this recovery off a Knoppix live CD, but am 
>> wondering, is it worth proceeding or these drives are completely gone? 
>> Your advise will be greatly appreciated 
> 
> It sounds like /dev/sda is completely gone. What about the other drive? 
> 
> You could use smartctl -A /dev/sda to check whether the drive thinks that 
> it's dead or dying, and check the Current_Pending_Sector and 
> Offline_Uncorrectable counts to see how many sectors the drive thinks are 
> bad. If it's not too many, some of the data may be recoverable from that 
> drive. 
> 
> Cheers, Chris. 
> -- 
> Aptivate | http://www.aptivate.org | Phone: +44 1223 760887 
> The Humanitarian Centre, Fenner's, Gresham Road, Cambridge CB1 2ES 
> 
> Aptivate is a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales 
> with company number 04980791. 
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