[mdlug] Recovering damaged EXT2

[David McMillan]

Michael Mikowski wrote:
> Dave --
>
> This does bring up a good point: perhaps it is time to go back to the original drive?  Sure it might be hosed, but perhaps /less/ hosed than the one you dropped on the floor.  Have you tried the same amount of due diligence on that drive?  You might have better luck with that.
>   
    The first drive died without warning with the "click of death," and 
won't even show up as a valid partition to gparted.  This drive, OTOH, 
seems tantalizingly close to recovery -- a nondestructive badblocks test 
came back with no errors.  But fsck can't seem to do anything with it, 
and the vague error message when I try using e2fsck -b is very frustrating.
> You might consider "soaking" either drive in the fridge for 4 hours before spinning it up.  This has worked for me before, and have been able to recover data until the drive warmed up.
>   
    I'm probably going to try that, but these are 1TB drives that were 
at around 90% capacity.  I don't know if the freeze will last long 
enough to do a full rsync on that much data.