Need help recovering from hard disk failure

[Jeff Green]

Always worth a try on a failed hard disk is to put the disk in question in
a well sealed plastic bag and place it in the freezer for several hours.
My experience is in about 50% of cases this will give you a disk that will
remain readable for up to half an hour, plenty of time to copy all the
data off.

Jeff

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 5:45 PM, John Hubbard <ender8282 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> My machine (running 8.04.1) has 3 hard drives.  Two drives are formated
>> with LVM and are mounted as /srv.  The other drive has /boot, /home,
>> swap, and /.  One of the LVM drives failed.  (I get a S.M.A.R.T BAD
>> during BIOS check.)  When ubuntu boots (either recovery mode, or
>> standard boot) eventually kicks me to busy box.  tty1 gives me some
>> error messages:
>> kinit: trying to resume from /dev/dsk/by-uuid/5...6
>> kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot...
>>  (I never hibernate working on this machine.(
>> mount: Mounting /dev/disk/by-uuid/3...3 on /root failed: Invalid
>> argument
>> mount: Mounting /roog/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: No such file or
>> directory
>> mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No sush file or directory
>> mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
>> Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init.
>>
>> I tried un-plugging the bad disk but that has no effect.  I realize that
>> I probably won't be able to recover any data off of the bad disk but is
>> there any hope to 1) get my machine back into a bootable state, and 2)
>> recover data off of the other half of the LVM?
>>
>> Unless someone has suggestions I was going to boot to a live cd, try to
>> copy as much as I can to a USB hd, and then reinstall.  I already have a
>> replacement hard drive to put in.
>> If I used gparted to set up the replacement drive can I put its uuid
>> into /etc/fstab and 'fix' everything?  If so how do I identify its uuid?
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> --
>> -john
>>
>> To be or not to be, that is the question
>>                2b || !2b
>> (0b10)*(0b1100010) || !(0b10)*(0b1100010)
>>        0b11000100 || !0b11000100
>>        0b11000100 || 0b00111011
>>               0b11111111
>>        255, that is the answer.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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>> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
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>>
>
> Hi
>
> Usually the best advice is indeed to boot from Live CD. DO NOT TRY AND
> BOOT FROM THE DISK. Booting from the disk may increase your problems.
> In the Live CD you should install ddrescue
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) and use that to
> copy the ENTIRE DRIVE to a new disk.
>
> ddrescue has some advantages above dd.
>
> Neil
>
> --
> There are three kinds of people: Those who can count, and those who cannot
> count
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