Re: Recovering select files from a failing hard disk

2007-01-12 Thread Chuck Swiger

On Jan 12, 2007, at 1:18 PM, Garrett Cooper wrote:
1. Can I bypass mounting or reading certain sections of the  
filesystem?


Sure, if you boot off some other device or a CD-ROM.


2. Can I force part of a drive to be remapped to other sectors?


Yes, but it is likely that modern drives will have automatically  
reassigned failing sectors already, until it ran out of spare  
sectors.  If you've got an older SCSI system, you might try running  
your adaptor's BIOS utility and having it do a device verify; that  
will encourage the drive to remap problematic sectors.


3. Is there a backup superblock on the disk and what would it be? I  
know
this feature exists on some filesystems, but I'm not sure if UFS is  
one

of those filesystems.


There are many backup superblocks kept on the disk; "fsck -b 32" will  
try using the first alternate, but there will be others scattered  
about.  You can run "dumpfs" to locate more, I believe.



The reason for these questions is that I believe that the
portion of my failing hard disk is involved with the statistics  
portion

for the data slice or a series of directories. So, I want to grab the
files off my disk and just dump the thing asap.


OK.  You might try doing a block-copy with dd to a new drive, and  
then trying to fsck or repair the data on that copy rather than  
trying to fix the filesystem on the failing drive...


--
-Chuck

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Recovering select files from a failing hard disk

2007-01-12 Thread Garrett Cooper
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Hello,
I know similar questions have been asked on the list, but this
one has a slight twist to it.
I have a failing hard disk that I want to recover only a few
directories from, so I was wondering..

1. Can I bypass mounting or reading certain sections of the filesystem?
2. Can I force part of a drive to be remapped to other sectors?
3. Is there a backup superblock on the disk and what would it be? I know
this feature exists on some filesystems, but I'm not sure if UFS is one
of those filesystems.

The reason for these questions is that I believe that the
portion of my failing hard disk is involved with the statistics portion
for the data slice or a series of directories. So, I want to grab the
files off my disk and just dump the thing asap.
- -Garrett
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