Re: data from kernel.bkbits.net

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 02:17:44PM -0500, Ricky Beam wrote:
> > On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > >Sorry to be short but I already said that I'd eliminated this source of
> > >error.  What did you think I was doing all weekend?
> >
> > Let me be equally short.  Your original message gave no details of what
> > debugging steps had been taken. (I can assume you would know what you're
> > doing, but frankly, I could be wrong.)  You venture a guess that the
> > system had been h4x0r3d in some inventive way to prevent your attempts
> > to recover data and proceed to paste error messages from the 3ware
> > driver that indicate a problem with the hardware (either driver bug,
> > cabling, controller, or channel on that controller) including the
> > drive itself.
> >
> > Please do not attribute to hackers what is simply a half dead drive.  So,
> > was the machine powered down for an extended period as I aluded? (to
> > preserve the machine until someone had time to look at it.)
>
> As I said, *both* drives have extensive file system problems.  No, the
> machine was not powered down for a long time, and no, neither of these
> drives are old, and no, they are not from the same factory batch (they
> aren't even the same vendor, one is a Maxtor and the other is a Seagate),
> and yes, I of course tried different cable/controller/machine combos.
>
> Any other questions?
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm
> -

Attempt to copy the raw drive to /dev/null.  If that works, the
drive is likely okay, but the fs got fsucked up by software. You
might be able to mount the drive on a 2.4.22 machine if you have a
spare. Then you might be able to selectively copy important stuff
to another drive, after which you can make a new file-system as
a "repair".

If you can't copy the raw drive, yet you booted on a system that
uses the same driver(s) to access the disk, then you probably
have a bad drive.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.22 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.