BLU's server crash and data recovery

[Tom Metro]

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> Look up ddrescue.  It's a variant of dd which tries hard to skip over
> bad blocks in order to recover every possible block of data it can.

ddrescue has been mentioned on the list before.

Supposedly Spinrite talks to the IDE controller on the drive and 
disables the internal retries and error correction, so it can access the 
raw data and fully control the recovery process. I'd be curious to know 
if ddrescue tries to do that.


Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> ...it looks like the data is on a RAID volume built with a hardware
> RAID controller...I don't think running dd on the individual disks
> connected to a standard SCSI controller is going to give you anything
> of value.

A dd copy of the underlying disk in a RAID set won't be of much use on 
its own, but it provides a fallback in case other recovery attempts on 
the disks fail. You can restore the dd images to new drives (or directly 
mount them through a loopback device) and attempt to put them back into 
the RAID set.


Jerry Feldman wrote:
> ...I will download and pay for Spinrite. It's
> worth it to spend $90 of BLUs money to try the recovery.

Did you notice whether Spinrite said it supported SCSI drives?

Spinrite might be useful to have for BLU installfests. Some people use 
it to quality check new drives before installing an OS.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/