I have a laptop which has a flaky(**) harddrive (ATA) and am trying to use
tomsrtbt to recover files off it and copy them off elsewhere. The laptop
has one EXT2 filesys (/ on /dev/hda3) and another EXT3 (/home on /dev/hda9).
I was using an old tomsrtbt diskette which was kicking around (it is ver
1.7.361) and successfully got all the files I wanted off the EXT2 filesys
and was feeling really pleased with yet another success story for tomsrtbt
(I am REALLY glad it has both plip and mount -t nfs - praise, flattery ...)
but that tomsrtbt wouldn't mount the EXT3. I made a 2.0.103 tomsrtbt but
this one won't boot at all - it hangs after these boot msgs:
...
PCI-IDE: unknown IDE controller ...
PCI-IDE: not 100% native, will probe irqs later
hda: IC25xxxxx ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: ICA25xxx 28615MB w/1806kb cache ...
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a National Semi.,..
HANG
The old 1.7.361 gets past that point and (with a slight difference in that
it prints only a single line for the hda) continues on with messages about:
scsi: 0 hosts
scsi: detected xxx
and then gets the partition map off the hda and we're up.
So I am guessing that 2.0.103 is stuck on the scsi (I assume this is
scsi-ide emulation as there's no scsi on this laptop).
On a different machine, the same 2.0.103 diskette boots just fine, so it's
most probably related to the flakiness(**) of the drive, but since the
1.7.361 aways boots successfully - I can't help wondering - is there
anything I can do to make a tomsrtbt which will boot AND mount the EXT3?
Seems there's gotta be a way ... Also - can I debug the hang? How?
Appreciate any help you can offer. John
(**) the drive occasionally fails a command and loops on retry - happens
randomly - sometimes ide0 reset works, sometimes not in which case I have to
power off. I am getting it replaced but will still have the old one to
try getting more data off it. Backup??? Hmmm...
