usb hard drives and file recover

[Brian McKee]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> i have a usb hard drive i have formated it to ext3
> ever once in a while my hard drive fails to mount with the message bus timed out error
> believing it needs to have a fsck check, i start a fsck check on the drive, after 24 hours, and no updates on screen.
> i unplug the drive and run fsck on my desktop
> I get error after error on the desktop
> so what am i doing wrong?

Well - for starters you aren't using plain text email to the mailing list :-)
Secondly, you didn't provide us with those errors.

When you say you ran it on your desktop - do you mean you used fsck on
a mounted disk - e.g. it was checking itself so to speak?  That's not
a good idea.  If want to run fsck on your desktop, boot from the live
cd and run it from there.  If that was what you did, then please show
us what those errors were.

As to your USB disk - the first step is to pull it out of the USB
enclosure and try it hooking it up directly, or at least in a
different enclosure - preferably on a different machine.
I've had as many issues with USB enclosures going bad as I have had
with the disks inside them having errors.  You need to isolate the
problem.

> and how do i recover lost files?

We haven't proved you've lost anything yet....

Does that get you started?

Brian