yafrank

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Hi All,
My old 40G Maxtor disk couldn't pass the MHDD scan test and reported several UNC errors. All of them are in a vfat partition according to the LBA. I'd like to follow the http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html, only to find there's no vfat example. I managed to get the block size by the "dosfsck -v" command. Then I used this number to calculate the block number of the unreadable sector. But I can't find a utility to do the final trick like debugfs for ext2 to identify the file associated with the sector.
Does anyone has any experience in this area?
Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Frank Wang

unSpawn

Maybe the Sleuth Kit tools (fls, ils et cetera) and docs like File System Analysis Techniques might help?

yafrank

I've installed the Sleuth Kit and tried some of its commands against the image of the partition. Ffind looks feasible for the job. I'm working on mapping the lba to the inode for the vfat partition.
Thanks for the quick reply.

jiml8

If you have or can borrow a copy of it, Spinrite might recover the drive to a fully functional state.

yafrank

After trial and error and reading the http://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/docs/skins_fat.txt, I realize maybe the route to map the LBA to inode nubmer for vfat partition is not right. As both istat and "blkls -l" use sector, instead of cluster, there maybe no need to do such translation to locate the possible associated file(s).
The MHDD had remapped LBA from 17518937 to 17518941, and it falls to the first partition of the disk according to "fdisk -lu." I then dd'ed the whole partition to hdc1.img. The dd process didn't give me any error, because the bad sectors were addressed by the remap of the MHDD.

[root@test ~]# blkls -e -l -f fat32 hdc1.img $((17518937-63))-$((17518941-63))
class|host|image|first_time|unit
blkls|test.yarbs.cn||1231336092|Sector
addr|alloc
17518874|f
17518875|f
17518876|f
17518877|f
17518878|f

The above means they're all unallocated. This is in accordance with the "fsstat -f fat32 hdc1.img," as 17518874-17518878 is not listed in the fat contents.

yafrank

I don't have it, neither do my friends here. Thanks for recommending anyway.

jiml8

You can buy Spinrite at GRC.com. It costs $89. I personally consider it to have been well worth the money. The data is far, far more valuable than the hardware, and time spent trying to recover valuable data is time spent not making money. When you look at it that way, Spinrite is dirt cheap.