Drive Recovery

[TexasMike]

Hello all,
I need to recover as much data as possible from a failing 500GB SATA drive. Drive started making noises like a bearing failing, and would not boot reliably. The drive is from my "home" system running Ultimate Edition 1.6 and Vista. I could care less about the Vista partition, but would really like to recover my Ultimate Edition 1.6 stuff. I have tried the following commands to mount the drive on my "shop" system (Ultimate Edition 1.7: GB S-series MB with 4GB RAM, 1ea 300GB SATA Drive (boot drive) and 2 500GB SATA drives - one of which is full of movie's from my "DVR system" at home (Win XP Pro with Beyound TV) which I cannot seem to get to play correctly, but that's a subject for later resolution). Here are the commands and results, as well as a "dmesg | tail" immediately after the two commands:

Trying to mount each partition as ext3:
root@mike-UUE-1-7:/home/mike# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdr2 /media/recover-drive/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdr2,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

root@mike-UUE-1-7:/home/mike# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdr1 /media/recover-drive/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdr1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

The results of "dmesg | tail"
root@mike-UUE-1-7:/home/mike# dmesg | tail
[11604.756261] EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
[11630.144809] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdr] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[11630.144819] end_request: I/O error, dev sdr, sector 478512092
[11630.145095] EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
[11928.875268] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdr] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[11928.875277] end_request: I/O error, dev sdr, sector 478512092
[11928.875287] EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
[11937.238375] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdr] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[11937.238384] end_request: I/O error, dev sdr, sector 65
[11937.238393] EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
root@mike-UUE-1-7:/home/mike#


This device is not a member of my RAID5 array (drives /dev/sda thru /dev/sdl). I am not sure which "partition" is the one with Ultimate Edition installed. Anyone here who can make sense out of this info, and offer any suggestions...?? I only want to copy or backup the Ultimate Edition 1.7 partition if possible, so I may restore it to the new drive (due in aprox 4 days).

Regards...
TexasMike

[DaddyX3]

So these are two completely different systems your trying to transfer info to and fro? How many drives on the home system? just the one? Then are you istaled on the home system with a NTFS file system or did you partition to an ext3 or other? I only ask why your trying so hard to use terminal with this? You can do the same thing with less head-ache by using nautilus and going through the network, right? I guess I don't know your exact ailments here. Any other info on the actual problem would help me. I know that you want to recover info from that drive, but don't know what you have tried and what you haven't.

[TexasMike]

DaddyX3,
The drive is from my home system, another Gigabyte MB, Core2Duo, 2GB DDRS ram, 1ea 160BG SATA II drive as 1st SATA drive, 2x500GB SATA II drives, DVD-R/RW. This drive is the 2nd SData drive, and it is the one with the screeching bearing. 1st drive is Vista, 2nd drive is Ultimate Edition 1.7 and X(I may have XP and Vista drives mixed up in this explanation). I installed Ultimate Edition 1.7 after Vista, with Grub boot menu onto the 2nd drive (500GB SATA II) and gave each a partition size or about 250GB. I assume that the reason my boot fails with thius drive disconnected has something to do with Grub and the windoze MBR; I believe this is because Grub is part of the Ultimate Edition drive and not part of one of the windoze drives. Anyway, I have tried to boot the Home system with and without the failing drive without success. That is why I brought the noisy drive to my office and connected it to my system here. In this scenario, I hoped to connect the drive to my system, boot, mount the drive, and, finally backup everything on the Ultimate Edition partition, save it for the arrival of the warranty replacement drive and restore to that drive when it arrives. Then remove from shop system, return to home system, and hopefully, the system would then boot with the drive back in place. This is my "hope". I suspect that I may have to just start from scratch, again. Be assured that if I do have to "start from scratch" and re-load my system, I will NOT be returning to Vista nor XP as a "stand alone" OS. If I can't get along without XP, I'll just put it in a Virtual Machine using VMWare Server and use it from there.
I have only tried what I have stated here: mount the drive; no other attempts at any sort of recovery in either system, otherwise. If I can just get the bloody thing to mount and run long enough, I will be able to copy my data files, emails, downloads, etc. to a portable drive, and return them to my home system when it is back up and running.
Obviously, I cannot connect to the home system via a network, as it will not boot without this drive working, whether it is physically installed or not. And, yes, the system had 2 NTFS file systems installed 1st (XP and Vista) and then Ultimate Edition 1.7 was installed from the Live CD, given the remaining 250GB on this drive, and the file system used for Ultimate Edition 1.7 was ext3, the other (1st) partition (either Vista or XP) was installed on this drive and given a 250GB partition BEFORE Ultimate Edition 1.7. The Vista/XP installs are several months old, and are there for my use in support of customers with PC problems (I am the semi-retired owner of a 27 year old PC Service and Repair company), so I could care less about recovering them, as I can install them to VMs if needed.
Hope this info helps you understand what I am trying to accomplish.

Regards...
TexasMike

[DaddyX3]

I think I got it now. Thank you. I would suggest if you have some confutsion on which partition has what OS on there you can (like I always do) use a live disk with gparted on it and go in with that and identify. I would also recomend this cause partition names sometimes get a little whacky on a computer and don't and aren't always formated as simply sda1-sda2-sda3 and so on, sometimes they end up as sda1-sda5-sda7 so you can imagine the frustration when trying to mount it via terminal without knowing the right partition names.
This is what I would do:
1) use gparted to identify the partition names of the drive and write them down.
2) sudo fdisk -l
to see if it was loaded by your machine to mount
3) sudo mkdir /media/your_choice_on_name_for_mount
4) sudo gedit /etc/fstab
5) follow the same pattern in your fstab for currently mounted drives.
Save and Exit -
Does this work???

[TexasMike]

DaddyX3,
Thanks for the information. I will try your suggestions saturday morning...I've had enough for today. I'll let ya know what the results are, as soon as I get back to the system with the suspect drive.

regards...

TexasMike

[vinca]

I think I got it now. Thank you. I would suggest if you have some confutsion on which partition has what OS on there you can (like I always do) use a live disk with gparted on it and go in with that and identify. I would also recomend this cause partition names sometimes get a little whacky on a computer and don't and aren't always formated as simply sda1-sda2-sda3 and so on, sometimes they end up as sda1-sda5-sda7 so you can imagine the frustration when trying to mount it via terminal without knowing the right partition names.
This is what I would do:
1) use gparted to identify the partition names of the drive and write them down.
2) sudo fdisk -l
to see if it was loaded by your machine to mount
3) sudo mkdir /media/your_choice_on_name_for_mount
4) sudo gedit /etc/fstab
5) follow the same pattern in your fstab for currently mounted drives.
Save and Exit -
Does this work???

I use this method too... works for me!

but mebbe not on a failing hard disk

[TexasMike]

I think I got it now. Thank you. I would suggest if you have some confusion on which partition has what OS on there you can (like I always do) use a live disk with gparted on it and go in with that and identify. I would also recomend this cause partition names sometimes get a little whacky on a computer and don't and aren't always formated as simply sda1-sda2-sda3 and so on, sometimes they end up as sda1-sda5-sda7 so you can imagine the frustration when trying to mount it via terminal without knowing the right partition names.
This is what I would do:
1) use gparted to identify the partition names of the drive and write them down.
2) sudo fdisk -l
to see if it was loaded by your machine to mount
3) sudo mkdir /media/your_choice_on_name_for_mount
4) sudo gedit /etc/fstab
5) follow the same pattern in your fstab for currently mounted drives.
Save and Exit -
Does this work???

Thanks for the info DaddyX3,
I used your suggestions and instructions. I made a dir under \media called "recover-drive", then used gparted to identify the drive and mounted it under /media/recover-drive. Mounted my normal boot drive, created a dir to hold the backup, then used the following commands to back it up:
cd "/home/mike/Documents/Home-UUE-Recover-BU (dir to hold backup)
tar cvpfz home-recover.tgz -C /media/recover-drive/
All appeared to go well & backup finished after a couple of hours.

NOTE: I did NOT boot with the Live-CD for the following:
Today, I received the replacement drive and installed it to the same SATA connection, booted my system normally and used gparted to partition the drive with a 228.17 GB ext3 partition and a 1.39GB swap partition (the same values that were on the old drive). I then used the following command to restore the backup to the nrew drive:
tar xvpfz /home/mike/Home-UUE-Recover-BU/home-uue-bu.tgz -C

Can you see this one coming.............??

My new drive now has the following directory tree : /media/recover/ with all the folders of the original drive WITHIN /media/recover/ ...!! Got any idea how I correct this fiasco...?? Do I need to boot with the Live-CD and re-restore the drive..?? "Confused???" "Why, yes I am!" (says my sub-concious)
I could use a pointer or two here if ya got one to spare....

Regards...

TexasMike

[DaddyX3]

Hey Mike, Sorry I haven't gotten back to you yet, I've been bang'n my head against the monitor on my own issues lately Anyway, have you come up with a solution yet? One thing that I would have done, is instead of installing the mirror image of the whole backup I would have just cp'd the whole thing back over. with all recursive files and directories. Basically you installed a iso image of the drive you backed up with the tree and everything ... lol. Sorry bout that. I'm sure you have it figured out by now anyways. If not I could give you another way to get the job done. It will be whacky and unheard of, but thats how I work. I get the job done. Although it is harder to do it when the computer is not sitting in front of me.