Need help recovering from hard disk failure

[John Hubbard]

John Hubbard 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:
>
>   
[snip]
> 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? 
>
>   
OK so I was completely wrong with what the problem was. The drive that 
fails the S.M.A.R.T test didn't have any problems. I booted to live and 
was able to copy the entire drive to its replacement with ddrescue. 
There were no errors. Both my /home and / partitions had problems. I 
couldn't copy them to my usb drive. I had to fsck both of them. After 
running fsck on both partitions I was able to mount them. (Just to be 
safe I mounted read only). When I rebooted the system came up more or 
less as expected. There was some lost information in my home directory 
but I was able to recover everything from backup.

Thanks for the information about ddrescue. I always enjoy finding out 
about low level tools that can utterly and completely destroy my system ;).

Also any idea why freezing a hard drive would help you recover the data 
off of it. There are relationships between temperature and conductivity. 
Is that the cause?


-- 
-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.