Hi All,

I am at a loss for words. One of my file servers died the other day. I can't boot up at all.

Specs -
hda contains / /home /var
hdc contains /back
hdd cdrom

about 2.5 GB of data is held in /home.

I back up by mounting /back, tgz'ing /home and that is written to /back, /back is then umounted. If someone lost a file in the past I was able to get the backup and the file with ease. Why do we backup this way, it was determined that this was the best way to do a backup for that location even though it was not being taken off site.

I got a call last week, the server is down. It was off actually. Press power and its like the drive is missing. Not detected in the bios. Checked the connections, jumpers etc... They had some power surges, actually brown outs probably because of the heat here in Chicago.

So I took hdc containing the backups, placed it in my work machine. Was able to mount it. I can see all of my backups. When I try to copy the backups off that drive to my main drive it was going slow, almost 16 hours to copy 1.6GB of 2.4GB then stopped. Tried again no luck. Tried to un tar the backup, that started but stopped after 20 minutes and only 1/16 of data recovered.

At this point I have two bad drives. I can't get any data off either. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thank You,
Al

Assuming these drives contains very important/valuable data, there is special services to recover data from dead hard drives... ask around, or take a look in the yelllow pages? Keep in mind these services are pretty expensive however (from 200$ to 10 000$ depending how much trouble they get) but usually reliable.

If you want to risk it and try some grand-momma tricks, here is my own "tricks" to resurect dead hdd (I got an average of 1 disk failure per years *sigh* ) but before trying keep in mind it could also just ruin further backup and destroy your data :
1- Try to unplug all non-vital device but the drive (might help if the PSU is damaged and can't provide enought power)
2- Put the drive in a different position (on the top, on the side, reverse up, etc...). Might help in case the head mecanism is dying (gravity will ease the work it need to do, hopefully)
3- Put the hdd in freezer (!!!) for 48 hours, then try to use it "cold". This might seem stupid, but this saved my ass at least once, hdd seems to have some kind of "thermal sensors" that are suppose to re-ajust to fit the heat... if this fail you won't be able to spin, as the hdd will reajust forever without ever spinning. The cold will make sure it won't even try. Beware still, a frozen hdd has big chance to die from condensation, _DONT_ plug it back in the computer unless you want to know if your motherboard can survive water rain.
4- Beat the hdd. Sometime, some (gentle) hit on the head motor or the spin motor can start it back if it has failed. Really dangerous, it's a last chance option.

I wish you good luck :/

Just for clarification: Is the issue then that you took hdc from the dead machine and installed it into a different computer (your work machine), and now any attempts to copy data from the old "dead hdc" onto a "good" drive in your work machine also fail? In other words, you know the old "dead hdc" is a problem and to make matters worse, your main drive in your work machine is also acting up? Or are the two dead drives hda and hdc from the dead machine?

I'll assume it's the former, and if the above is accurate, then the first thing I'd try is to fall back on Knoppix. The fact that you can mount the old "dead hdc" and see the files is a positive sign, but it sounds unusual that a good drive in your main PC is also misbehaving. Assuming that you can commandeer a spare machine (with a known-to-be-good hard drive), I'd try putting the old dead hdc in that, booting up Knoppix, and seeing if you can recover the files that way. In terms of performance, one factor that could be responsible for the poor transfer rates is if you have both drives on the same IDE channel (ie, the same ribbon cable). My recommendation would be to put the drives on different channels, and to stop any other sorts of activity on the machine except for the data recovery attempt.

Good luck with it. Worst case scenario is that you'd need to get in touch with a data recovery service; as long as the drive has not been seriously damaged, chances are good that they can recover the data. Unfortunately those services are not cheap. -- J.W.

I will try knoppix, I didn't even think of that. If that doesn't work I may try 1-4 from half_elf. Thanks for the advice I will let you know the outcome.

Oh yeah, of course I forgot the FIRST rule : NEVER boot from the hdd you are trying to resurrect. Knoppix is a very good solution. Keep in mind that every spin your drive make is 1 spin closer to his very last breath. Don't spin it (or try to) unless you have too. Make every spin count