Data recovery emergency on a downed server... Help please!!

[Teddy Mills]

Either the drive had a hardware OR the superblock is toast.  It doesnt seem
likely to be both.
>From your description, it appears that the drive is functioning,  but the
superblock is gone. Is that correct?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Madison Kelly" <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 12:23 AM
Subject: [TLUG]: Data recovery emergency on a downed server... Help please!!


> Hi everyone,
>
>   Well, the fact that I am posting this after 12:00am Sunday night (and on
> my birthday, to-boot!) should indicate just how dire the situation is...
> I have had a drive failure on a server and I can no longer mount the
> data partition on the hard drive (/dev/hda5 [ext3 under RH7.3]) because
> the replacement server (Fedora Core 1) claims that the drive's
> superblock is toast.
>
>   Now, before anyone rips me a new one, I -DO- have a tape drive but that,
> too, has rather depressingly failed. When I try to recover the files
> from the IDE Travan 8GB drive it successdully recovers about 50 files
> and then fails with this...
>
>  -= Begin Error =-
> [root-9CO/sRhIDOA at public.gmane.org tape]# tar zxvf /dev/ht0
> .
> [bunch-of-files]
> .
> home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
> Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/navex15.exp
> home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
> Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/navex15.sys
> home/OldC/Program Files/Common Files/Symantec
> Shared/VirusDefs/19970902.001/NAVEX15.VXD
>
> gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
> tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
> tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
> [root-9CO/sRhIDOA at public.gmane.org tape]#
>  -= End Error =-
>
> This is true on three of the tapes I have tried to recover from. The data
> was backed up via this simple script:
>
>  -= Begin Script =-
> mt -f /dev/ht0 erase
> mt -f /dev/ht0 rewind
> tar zcvf /dev/ht0 /home/*
>  -= End Script =-
>
> I have been Googling for a while now with no success. If anyone has any
> clues, by all means -please- share them... Also, if anyone here can
> recommend (as a fall back) a data recovery house that won't balk at an
> ext3 partition, please forward contact info.
>
> Thanks everyone (again!!!)
>
> The Ever-Stumbling Madison
> --
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>

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