Recovering Data for the less fortunate
 

Hi All!

I had a harddrive die on me. Looks like it has developed bad sectors and I cannot get it to mount. I tried fsck but it tells me to do it manually (like I know how to do that). In addition when I try and mount it it says either too many filesystems, or bad sectors in supermount. Something like that.

I really need the data off this drive. I do not have any recent backups.


So does anyone have any ideas? I tried to dump the data using:

dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=mydrive.rip

But that told me there were bad sectors.

How to recover data from a filesystem that won't mount because of bad sectors.

fdisk says:
Disk /dev/hdb: 2162 MB, 2162442240 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 523 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 51 205600+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hdb2 * 52 523 1903104 83 Linux


Thanks,

David

Telling us your actual filesystem might be a nice place to start. Linux has more than one. Not that it'll ultimately help, but it would be somewhere to begin.

Hey

It looks like a reiserFS (I am still pretty New so I might be missing other information).

David

==============================
Will read-only check consistency of the filesystem on /dev/hdb2
Will put log info to 'stdout'

Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes] (note need to type Yes if you do):Yes
###########
reiserfsck --check started at Sun Mar 20 08:19:17 2005
###########
Replaying journal..

The problem has occurred looks like a hardware problem. If you have
bad blocks, we advise you to get a new hard drive, because once you
get one bad block that the disk drive internals cannot hide from
your sight,the chances of getting more are generally said to become
much higher (precise statistics are unknown to us), and this disk
drive is probably not expensive enough for you to you to risk your
time and data on it. If you don't want to follow that follow that
advice then if you have just a few bad blocks, try writing to the
bad blocks and see if the drive remaps the bad blocks (that means
it takes a block it has in reserve and allocates it for use for
of that block number). If it cannot remap the block, use badblock
option (-B) with reiserfs utils to handle this block correctly.

bread: Cannot read the block (8033): (Input/output error).

Warning... fsck.reiserfs for device /dev/hdb2 exited with signal 6.
fsck.reiserfs /dev/hdb2 failed (status 0x8). Run manually!