[mdlug] Recovering damaged EXT2

[Aaron Kulkis]

David McMillan wrote:
> 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.


Well then, keep it cool.

Plastic ziplock sandwich bag(*) full of ice
		on top of
	     damp wash cloth
		on top of
	    flaky disk drive


(*) TEST FOR LEAKS!!!