Hard Drives won't mount, return errors

n.b.r. · 07-25-2008, 02:18 PM

Hi all. I have been having some hard drive problems and I don't know what to do. I am really hoping there is some way to recover the data off these drives.

I had 2 500GB Western Digital Cavier SE16 drives set up as RAID 1 under Ubuntu Linux 8.04. I started hearing a clicking noise when I booted, and the BIOS gave me the message "Primary Slave Hard Disk Error, Press F1 to continue". At that point, the system would boot very slowly, but it would still mount the array and I could still read and write to it; however, being nervous about the disks, I shut it down until I was ready for backups.

I set up an old PC to rsync the files over to before the drives died altogether. When I tried to boot my main system again, it took an extremely long time, I got the "hard disk error" message again, and now Ubuntu doesn't mount the array. Both disks seem to be dead.

I tried throwing each of the drives (one at a time) in another Ubuntu machine. dmesg reports the following pertinent output:

Code:

[  100.414735] ata4: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0xef00 ctl 0xee00 bmdma 0xed08 irq 17
[  105.769318] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc1)
[  110.582476] ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[  115.775420] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc1)
[  118.246122] ata4.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[  118.246175] ata4: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[  128.439931] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)
[  133.253088] ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[  138.446022] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)
[  141.252535] ata4.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[  141.252589] ata4: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[  151.446356] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)
[  156.259502] ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[  161.452438] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)
[  164.258950] ata4.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[  164.259003] ata4: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[  174.452759] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)
[  179.265917] ata4: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[  184.458850] ata4: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xc0)

Are my drives dead, or are there any tools that might help me out? I don't care about the physical drives, I just want to recover the data. I would prefer an open source or free solution, but I would be willing to shell out a few dollars for proprietary software if that's what it takes.

Any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks.

saikee · 07-25-2008, 02:36 PM

If it is Raid 1 as reported why not remove Disk A to see if Disk B is good. Repeat the same step by running Disk A to find out which disk is bad.

You can then just run the good disk alone and forget about the Raid. Isn't this what Raid 1 supposed to protect you against hardware fault by running a mirror image permanently?

n.b.r. · 07-25-2008, 02:40 PM

Thank you for the response.

Sorry if I was unclear, I have tried mounting the drives seperately, and I still get the same output in dmesg. They seem to have both died within a very short window of time; I've certainly learned my lesson about using two disks purchased at the same time from the same manufacturer for RAID 1

saikee · 07-26-2008, 07:13 AM

Are you aure it was Raid 1 and not Raid 0?

n.b.r. · 07-26-2008, 11:51 PM

Yeah, I'm sure it was RAID 1.

To clarify: the dmesg output above is from when I stuck one of the drives in another machine. The other drive produced identical output when I swapped them.

Mr. C. · 07-26-2008, 11:58 PM

The clicking noise and the errors indicate the drives are kaput. You can go to the drive MFG website and download any diagnostic tool that can run under a bootable disk to verify.

n.b.r. · 07-27-2008, 12:41 AM

That's what I was afraid of.

WD does indeed have a bootble diagnostics iso on their site, but it doesn't see the drives. I guess they're done for...

jiml8 · 07-27-2008, 12:24 PM

If the data is important, get a copy of Spinrite and give it a whirl.

There is a very good chance that it will restore your drive(s) at least long enough for you to recover the data. Spinrite isn't cheap, though. But it does work miracles presuming you are not having a bearing failure.

I do consider it to be more than a bit strange that two drives failed at the same time...I would be wondering about some environmental condition. Coincidences do happen, though.

n.b.r. · 07-27-2008, 03:21 PM

Thank you for the suggestion. Spinrite looks promising, and they have a money-back guarantee. $90 is not so bad if it works as well as they claim.

I agree, both drives failing at the same time is very strange. I guess the moral of the story is, don't use identical drives from the same lot for RAID, and always do regular backups.

jiml8 · 07-27-2008, 03:46 PM

The claims for spinrite are not exaggerated.

In my personal experience (and I have on many occasions loaned my copy of spinrite to other people...my experience includes theirs), if the drive will spin up and the bearings are OK, and the controller electronics have not failed, and the heads work, then spinrite WILL recover the drive.