[Wolves] Horrid Hard Drives & Hairy Holidays

[Andy Smith]

Hi Kris,

On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 08:44:56PM +0000, Kris Douglas wrote:
> "Grub: Error 15"(I think)… oh crap. So I went to Google and it
> told me something could be missing, oh well… no big deal… live CD
> in the drive and back it all up, how hard can that be? Very, in
> fact, it didn't work, The partition on the drive was Unknown, it
> wouldn't mount and I couldn't see any files on it.

I think you are quite screwed.  Does the disk get recognised in the
BIOS at all?  If so perhaps it is just the partition table that is
damaged.

I would recommend:

- buying at least two disks that are bigger than the 200G one that's died

- using dd_rescue or similar to take an image of your dead
  drive/partition into a file on one of the new drives

- take another copy of this file to experiment on as a loopback
  mount.

If you can get an image of partition then you may be able to rescue
some things with fsck.  If you can't see the partitions then you may
be able to get them back by writing a new partition table with the
right start/end values (which you may be able to find by searching
for an ext3 or whatever signature across the whole disk).

If the dead drive does not want to play at all then you may find
putting it in the freezer for a few hours brings it back to life for
a short period of time.  Or you may be able to get it working again
by replacing the drive electronics with some from an identical other
drive.

Once you've done as much as you can, set up software RAID on the 2+
disks you've bought, and consider a backup routine.

Cheers,
Andy

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