> Our main server have disk problems, [...] First thing I would say is, copy what you can off the still-mostly-working drive. Use a livecd, or move the drive to another machine, or whatever, but get a copy of the bits that still remain readable. Make multiple copies of them, on multiple spindles, to make it harder to lose them.
There are at least two tools designed for this sort of case (ddrescue, or rescue-dd, or some such - the two are named slightly differently and I don't recall the exact names). I also have something called blt which, while designed with different emphasis (speed on error-free copies), can do this. (ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouseware/hacks/blt.c if you want mine.) Once you have a few clean copies, try fscking one of them. fsck may be able and willing to mostly fix the filesystem once it's no longer getting read errors. Copy back onto a(nother) drive. Run recovery tools. You can afford to play a bit more once you're not working with the only extant copy of the data. You might also consider some kind of hot backup that's not quite as failure-concealing as a RAID/GEOM mirror. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
