We waited too long to replace the failed drive, so there were errors on both drives in the mirror, so the data was not completely restored. Backups were not as recent as we would have liked. Since the drive didn't completely fail, it seemed worth trying to retrieve some data where possible from it.
1. Is it normal for the operating system to freeze when accessing damaged sectors - even if the only access is via a raw, unmounted partition? This seems like a hardware problem to me, except that errors are logged to /var/log/messages as I described in the original post. 2. What utilities will show which sectors are occupied by specific files? Ideally I could specify a range of sectors and a list of files using those sectors would be provided. It would also be nice to specify files and be shown which sectors they occupy. I've heard of the Coroner's Toolkit; are there any other recommendations? On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:02:44AM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote: > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Amit Kulkarni <amitk...@gmail.com> wrote: > > pardon my ignorance but if you restored your data already, why bother > > investigating disk failure? > > Unless they are all the same person, there seems to be a sudden rash > of people who want to bring a disk back from the dead because they are > unwilling or unable to do the math on how much disks cost, how much > time costs, and what the future integrity of their data is worth. I > don't know why this is, but I do know "disks die, buy new ones" is the > correct answer to give them.
