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

[Madison Kelly]

I do have an identical spare drive but how can I make an exact copy of a
drive with a messed up file system and also, how can I be sure that the
copy is non-destructive? If I can do this, it'd be wonderful!

Madison

PS - I got a dd of th last tape that ran (finally) and it is about 3.6GB
(about right). I extracted it as a tar.gz (which should work) but it fails
claiming to not be a gzip archive... Any ideas on that front by chance?

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> Hi Madison,
>
> First, if you have a spare hard drive, make a copy of the data on the
> bad disk (or better yet two) in case the hardware will die, and work on
> the copy.
>
> Then do:
>
> # /sbin/mke2fs -n /dev/hda5 -b [blocksize]
> Be sure to use the right block size here!
>
> You will see output including:
>
> Superblock backups stored on blocks:
>         8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729
> These are the locations of the superblocks.
>
> Pass these one by one to:
>
> e2fsck -b [backup superblock location] -y /dev/hda5
>
> [read up on "man e2fsck"]
>
> If one of these superblocks are OK, e2fsck will start recovering all
> possible data (the -y switch means "yes to all"; otherwise you get
> thousands of prompts).
>
> All the possible files will be dumped into the /lost+found directory.
> - From there, you should be able to do something like:
>
> find /lost+found/* -name [some directory you are sure of the location of]
>
> i.e.
> find /long+found/* -name anton
> allowed me to find my home directory.
>
> the /lost+found directory basicly contains many hard links to the same
> files.
>
> You should be able to find your /home, /var, /etc, or whatever other
> directories you have on the drive and move them back to their respective
> spot.
>
> Be careful - many files may be corrupt without warning.
>
>
> Using this technique, I was able to recover an ext3 partition after
> deleting it, resizing the partition, reformatting as reiserfs, and using
> it for two days.  About 70% of the files got recovered, but it obviously
> depends on the damage done.
>
>
> Madison Kelly wrote:
>> That would seem to be the case. However, I have used -many- of these
>> Seagates and I have never seen one suddenly pooch before. I am debating
>> running the Seagate test on it or decide to just recommend having it
>> sent
>> to a data recovery house...
>>
>> I know that backups of the superblock are made, do you know by chance
>> how
>> to locate them and/or how to tell the OS to use one for mounting? Also,
>> at
>> least two partitions on the drive have gone bad...
>>
>> Madison
>>
>>
>
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