On 6/1/06, John Brahy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
For a couple weeks I was running without backups and one of the drives died. Is there a way to recover any of the data from the drives?
The easy answer is "No". If the dead drive just has some hard errors and won't fsck, you might be able to force the stripe set back together in a read-only mode and copy off potentially bad data. The hard answer is "how much time you want to waste before deciding the easy answer was enough?" IF you only had 2 drives in the RAID0, the file is smaller than the stripe size, and it was not fragmented, you've got a 50% chance it's on the good drive. Good luck finding it, you'll have to re-invent filesystem utilities or sift through the entire contents of the drive. Anything beyond that involves "heavy wizardry". From various database files you might be able to extract raw data rows, running strings will show you ascii text, tar and most files have a recognizable header that you might be able to find. You'll be writing your own tools from scratch and learning far more than you wanted to about filesystems and file formats. -- Jon Simola (who spent a week recovering single files from the inside of archives after someone formatted and recycled the drive)
