[MLUG] A recovery story

[ravnox at arkanox.net]

This is my own little recovery story which had a happy ending a few
minutes ago.  I thought I would share it with the group since it might
be useful.  Though to be honest, I wouldn't have had to work this hard
if I had finished doing my backup. (It takes a while to burn 500GB)

My main hard disk failed me on Sunday with no warning.  The BIOS said
the SMART status was bad.  It failed while I was trying to open
konqueror, I received a few error messages and the system crashed.
I couldn't mount my partitions anymore, fsck wouldn't run.  The disk
was detected though.

Here's what I did...  I could still read from the drive but my
partitions were corrupted.  I couldn't run any operations on it that
required a write.  I took an other hard disk and used dd_rescue to copy
the content of the disk to an other one.  It took a long time but it
worked.  From there, I couldn't run fsck because it couldn't find a
superblock on it and I had no idea where the superblock was on the
disk.  I used a tool called testdisk to find the superblocks on the
partitions.  After that, it was just a matter of running fsck.ext3 with
the superblock location and the block size on it.  A few minutes of
holding the "y" key to fix everything and my data was back.

1. dd_rescue
2. testdisk
3. fsck.ext3

I'm really happy that we have such quality tools to work with under
Linux.

-- 
Ravnox