May 03, 2008 11:42 AM
RIP and ddrescue
Recently two drives on the computer got confused and started spilling out error messages when I rebooted. Eventually I tracked it down to this;-
The exact message that was being shown at the start of this saga was
Back home and thinking about it, I'd better partition this drive before I use it, so into the machine it went and I loaded up knoppix, set the root password,and then formatted it using gparted. Came out of knoppix which had now done its job and went back into RIP. Both drives were unmounted and i was able to use ddrescue to copy information off the dodgy disk onto a brand new disk.
It was rather scary doing it, but having done it successfully once I feel confident about doing it for the other three drives in the box, once I've got the new hard drives that is :).
fsck ext3. no such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hdf1. The syperblock 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
The exact message that was being shown at the start of this saga was
buffer i/o error on device hda1, logical block 0and then the logical block would increase by one until I switched the machine off. This was looking serious so I started asking questions in the forums and chatrooms in irc and came across RIP [Recovery Is Possible]. but to recover a hard drive I'd need a new one to recover onto, so off I toddled to get one.
Back home and thinking about it, I'd better partition this drive before I use it, so into the machine it went and I loaded up knoppix, set the root password,and then formatted it using gparted. Came out of knoppix which had now done its job and went back into RIP. Both drives were unmounted and i was able to use ddrescue to copy information off the dodgy disk onto a brand new disk.
It was rather scary doing it, but having done it successfully once I feel confident about doing it for the other three drives in the box, once I've got the new hard drives that is :).