Problems with SMART drive

telakenesys · 12-03-2006, 02:55 AM

I am having all sorts of trouble with one of my drives. The other night I ran some SMART diagnostic test on my drive, and since then I can't mount it. I have tried everything. It has bad sectors on it.

I have tried to Ghost it, and gave up after about two hours when it had copied 190MB and had about 200 hours to go.

I thought that I might be able to mount it in another machine a try to copy the data that I need that way. /dev/hdc1 & /dev/hdc2 did exist, but now they dont and all I have is /dev/hdc but when I got to try to mount it is says that id doesn't exist.

What can I do? The data is important.

osvaldomarques · 12-03-2006, 08:09 AM

Hi telakenesys,

I'm afraid you have little chance with your disk. I guess the fact that there is no partition devices means your partition table is lost. Do you know where your partitions start and end? What kind of partitions were they? If they were ext2/ext3, you could use e2tools to read the disk without mount it.

May be the kernel does not access the disk because the bios did report the disk as bad; try to disable the smart option of the bios to see if the partitions reappear.

I would suggest you comment your hdc mount entries on the /etc/fstab before turn on the disk to reduce the disk access to the minimum because the next access can be the last.

The e2tools has the common commands cp, ls prefixed by "e2", e2cp, e2ls, etc. You will use the device to reference the file system, for example:

Code:

e2ls /dev/hdc1:/

for the root of the file system.

But all I am talking depends on have the partitions and they are ext2/ext3.

telakenesys · 12-03-2006, 08:55 AM

The partitions are ext2, I'm sure. I had a look in the BIOS, but there is no place to turn off SMART.
I dont have anything in my fstab. I am using FC5 if that helps.

I will give e2tools a go.

The strange thing is that the partitions were in /dev/ and then when I went to mount, they were gone.

osvaldomarques · 12-03-2006, 09:26 AM

Look at the /var/log/messages, search for "hdc" and see what kernel is reporting about it. On the other hand, take a look on the cables, try to identify if the disk is turning on when you power the system. When you have a cable problem it's possible the kernel couldn't access it.

It's normal you see the device and can't mount it if there any problems with the drive. Also the modern systems use udev, which create the devices on demand. If the kernel can't access a device it does not create it.

telakenesys · 12-04-2006, 02:49 AM

I had a look in /var/log/messages and there is no mention of hdc anything. So I ran fsck /dev/hdc with the following output:

Code:

Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...

fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hdc
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

I also tried this with e2fsck with the same result. When I try:

Code:

e2ls /dev/hdc1:/
No such file or directory

I was talking to someone today, and they said trying e2fsck with an alternate superblock. How??

osvaldomarques · 12-04-2006, 07:27 AM

I'm sorry to say that without the partition table you can't find /dev/hdc1 neither /dev/hdc2.

linuxonbute · 12-04-2006, 07:43 AM

Quote:

Code:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

Quoting from your last post

The answer was in it:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
best wishes