looking for linux experts, part 2

[Tim Writer]

ted leslie <tleslie-RBVUpeUoHUc at public.gmane.org> writes:

> its a laptop,
> 250GB for 100$ with enclosure and usb interface?
> you have a good hardware supplier! :)
> 
> if your HD crunches more as its used, dd the whole thing would be really bad,
> especially if it generates 10,000 kernel "disk" messages a minute.
> if you do decide to dd ... i'd try a dry run with say 10 MB
> before you get your HD nice and toasty warm.

I'm inclined to agree with Lennart, the sooner he can get his data (whether
fully intact or not) off the failing disk, the better. dd is a good way to do
it. With dd, he can make a single pass, minimizing disk access. If dd gets
hung up part way through, due to the bad blocks, he can use dd's skip option
to (attempt to) skip past the problem area. By using the seek option together
with skip, he can build a complete image of the failing disk with holes
around the problem area. With a little luck, he'll be able to repair his file
system(s) using the image. In short, the less disk activity, the more likely
he'll be able to recover his data before the disk fails altogether.

> you can even get a USB flash from a local radio shack, camera shop, even a drug store, and probably even 
> a book store, etc, 
> so it might be a bit easy and quicker to obtain.
> 
> -tl
> 
> 
> On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:33:07 -0500
> lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org (Lennart Sorensen) wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 05:15:11PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> > > what type of high speed do you have?
> > > 
> > > 100MB could be reduced to 15-20 MB even with zip.
> > > 
> > > I have 70kb/s up from my cable internet, so thats almost 1 meg every 2 minutes,
> > > 
> > > you can by a 512MB usb key from you local future shop for 60$?
> > > or atleast a 256 for under that,
> > > the suse you have does recognize that right away,
> > > so just move your stuff to a usb key,
> > > its very valuable and cheap to have a usb flash RAM storage in this day and age.
> > > i would recommend you get one regardless, its great for backup.
> > 
> > Or you can get a 250G drive for a bit over $100 and just dd the entire
> > old drive's partition to a partition on the new drive and do your repair
> > work on the copy should there be any need to repair the filesystem to
> > read it.  Smaller disks cost a bit less.
> > 
> > Using an internet connection is dreadfully slow compared to a disk to
> > disk copy, and with a disk about to fail, you don't have infinite time.
> > 
> > Basic steps:
> > 
> > Install new disk on secondary controller
> > boot from livecd
> > cfdisk the new drive (hdc if master on second cable, hdd if slave, sd? if sata
> > drive)
> > mkfs the partition you just made.  I like mke2fs -j (for ext3) myself. 
> > mount new partition somewhere like /mnt/new (might have to mkdir) with
> > mount -t ext3 (or whichever) /dev/partition /mnt/new
> > dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/new/hda1.img conv=noerror bs=128k
> > 
> > repeat dd for each partition.  You can later mount those images using
> > mount -o loop -t filesystemtype imagefilename /mountpoint, and then read
> > the data from them, or run fsck on those images after making a fresh
> > copy to experiment on.  
> > 
> > Running fsck on a breaking disk is pretty close to data suicide,
> > especially with reiserfs which is hardly known for having a reliable fsck.
> > Lovely filesystem, until something goes wrong, then the complexity hurts
> > a lot.
> > 
> > Lennart Sorensen
> > --
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-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml