Hi gang, I'm looking for a way to copy files off of a RAID5 that got sick and corrupted a bunch of files. Here's what I've tried so far:

(1) cp -r /raiddir /destdir

basically this works for a while, then hangs. I'm not sure, why, but my guess is there is a read error somewhere in the copying operation, and it just stops. So, can I copy and suppress the consequences of read errors at the same time?

(2) tar --ignore-failed-read /raiddir /destdir

basically, the same result as above. Eventually the tar process just hangs.

(3) find /raiddir -exec cp {} /destdir \;

This actually works, but it strips the path information from the copied file. Anyone know a work around?

(4) dd conv=noerror if=/dev/raiddevice of=/dev/destdevice

Here I've noticed two issues. (a) the partition table from the raid device gets written to the destination device, and the destination device gets all confused about its size and (b) sooner or later dd encounters faulty data and hangs.
'
(5) fsck -p /dev/raiddevice

Sooner or later there is an unanticipated error and I'm asked to run fsck manually. If I were a hardware guru I might know what to do next, but I'm baffled.

Any wisdom from the community will be much appreciated. I've a research group here crossing their fingers that I can recover their data...

Thanks,

Dave

How about this? Step one:

find /raiddir > /tmp/x1

You'll now have the names of all the files to be copied.

Then write a Perl script to input that and produce individual cp commands. If you want, you can put stuff in the script to do special handling for things like directories and symbolic links.

Yeah... I tried that. Let me get a bit more technical. All of the drives in the computer are built from a hardware RAID 5 of ~700 GB. That hardware RAID has then been partitioned in a fairly typical unix manner - into /home, /usr, /tmp, etc, and, of course, /raid, which is our storage area and is the largest partition.

Now, the catch here, is that the entire RAID has been corrupted, not just the /raid directory. In fact, the operating system itself will not come up. So, I'm running of the installation CDs in "linux rescue" mode. There is no readily accessible perl executable, and I'm not real savvy with csh or bash scripting.

Leaving my scripting issues aside, if I take your suggestion, will this preserve the entire path?

I'm not sure what you mean by "preserve the entire path", but it will show the full path of each source file name. For example,

find /raiddir

will output

/raiddir/a
/raiddir/a/alpha
/raiddir/a/beta
/raiddir/b

and so forth.

When you say "no readily accessible perl executable", what does "readily accessible" mean? Is it that you know for sure that Perl is not on the rescue disk?

There is no perl executable on the rescue disk. However, I'll take care of that by burning a better rescue disk... like knoppix or something. Thanks for your input. BTW, if you have a suggestion for your favorite rescue disk...

Thanks

...dave