Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB drive dead? (Commands to check?)

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann
<volkerarmin@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sonntag 20 September 2009, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >   I seem to have lost an external USB drive I've been using on my
>> > MythTV backend server for video storage. What commands can I try to
>> > get it to wake up or at least show me what's working and what isn't?
>> > The drive shows under fdisk /dev/sda. I can see the large partition,
>> > and it seems to be the right size, according to fdisk anyway, but I
>> > cannot mount it using mount, and so far I cannot get e2fsck to do
>> > anything. Both of these fail:
>> >
>> >
>> > mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /video
>> > mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /video
>> >
>> >   I have power cycled the drive and I've rebooted the MacMini. Nothing
>> > changed.
>> >
>> > Thanks in advance,
>> > Mark
>> >
<SNIP>
>> I could try reinstalling the file system but I had a few backups on
>> this drive for other systems. (non-critical, but possibly useful) I'd
>> like to be sure I cannot recover them before I blow everything away.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mark
>>
>
> you might be lucky and able to use smartctl on that device. Sadly most usb
> converters don't support smart even when the drive does.
>
> That could tell you some more, but a quick glance says:
>
> your drive is hosed.
> Block errors... ugh... maybe the heads had a bit of platter contact.
>
> You can try using magicrescue - or even better photorec.
>
> they won't repair your filesystems - but they might be able to get the data off
> you are after.
>
> Glück Auf
> Volker
>

Thanks. I'll check these apps out.

So far the only life I've found is with e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/sda1.
This starts finding some things that make sense name-wise but then
starts complaining about other things.

Again, it's just mythtv video files so those can probably just be
rerecorded at some point. The backups were for my Windows machines
which are working right now so as long as I make some new backups
elsewhere I should be reasonably safe unless I find one day that
something I need then isn't on my machine right now.

Sad when your backup strategy goes against you...

Again, thanks for the pointers.

- Mark