Hard Disk Recover

One great morning i got a mail from smartmond, the hard disk monitoring tool based on the SMART protocol. My hdc was failing. The biggest partition is having a lot of trouble. This is the one where i put videos, and also /tmp. I think /tmp is to blame, because it trashes the hard disk, and often the partition failing is the one holding /tmp (yes i often have HD crashes)

The hard disk were all maxtor. I dont think i'll ever buy maxtor anymore. Only if all others are really even worse..

so what i did :

• first i try hard to recover some files, and managed to save some videos.
• then i put another hd on hdc, and put this one on hdd. I was happy with the partitionning and kept the same partition layout.
• i used ddrescue. it took a whole day, and the computer was almost unable to do anything else (too bad, that's my server..).

 ddrescue  -v /dev/hdd6  /dev/hdc6 ~/hdd6.ddrescue.logfile

Not bad, it managed to rescue almost all the 170gb : only 87kb were definitely lost.

• i tried to reiserfsck hdd6,because it's said all over the web that ddrescue could make the hard disk to write to bad blocks, which is supposed to be good because hard disks can then remember about bad blocks (this doesn't happen on read). But no.. no way
• i then tried reiserfsck on hdc6, which failed with

 10 found corruptions can be fixed only when running with --rebuild-tree

• so i do

 reiserfsck --logfile ~/hdd6.reiserfs.logfile --rebuild-tree  /dev/hdc6

It took one hour but seems to have worked. I do another reiserfsck to check.

 reiserfsck  /dev/hdc6

• let's mount it and check, it works! Mmhh, of course, the most important directories are not there anymore, but i can find most of files in lost+found. They have meaningless names such as "79331_243606".