Re: hard drive recovery...

From: Adam bultman <adamb@glaven.org>
Date: Sun Oct 10 2004 - 22:21:00 AKDT

Clay Scott wrote:

>i'm interested in advice from people on the list who have experienced hard drive failures. my western digital 100gb drive started making noises that no hard drive should make on wednesday. i turned off the machine let it sit overnight and it seemed all was well. i left the machine off for a few days when the drive started making noises again. i was holding out until i got paid on friday to go out and get a new one, but, sadly, it couldn't hold out that long. out of all of the drives in the machine this was my /home and the most important one. i've since gotten a 200gb replacement, but i can't seem to get the drive to be detected properly so i can copy the data from it.
>
>i'm not sure what my options are. i really need to get this data back and letting it sit un-powered isn't cutting it anymore. what have you guys done, if anything, to recover data from a dead or dying hard drive or to get a not-quite-dead drive to at least run for a short time to copy some data?
>
>~clay
>
>
>

I've done some work on recovering from bad drives before.

Unfortunately, your problems, which sound like physical ones, are
difficult to recover from. Please disregard advice like, "You'll get a
few more good uses out of them by freezing it overnight; the cooled
hardware runs better, and you can get the data off it you need!" Things
like that don't work (trust me; I had a boss who had me try it 'just in
case') unless you have a bad drive from excessive heat (and in which
case, I'd recommend just putting a lot of fans on it when it's in an
open space).

The best thing to do is to mount it correctly, keep it cool, give it one
last go to get all the data you can from it. In more than one case,
I've copied several times to different drives/machines in the case that
the dying hardware is preventing correct reads (like bad sectors;
sometimes you'll miss data, or the copy will kill the machine, and you
have to start over).

What I'll typically do in the case of what I think is a drive failure
(and clicking noises often are) is back things up IMMEDIATELY and fiddle
with the drive once your data is safe. Take the drive out, put it in
another machine, but make sure your data is safe. It may not ever fire
up again, and if you wait (like turning off the machine and waiting
overnight) your data may already be gone, or significantly scrambled.

In the event of a drive that I think is dying, I will do things like:
Check/replace IDE/SCSI cables. Check/Replace power (cord) to the drive
(is the power consistent? A re-starting drive (you can here it spinning
up) can be from dirty power or inconsistent power, or even not enough
power). Try the drive in another machine, or on another IDE chain, or
with another IDE setting, outside the case and after being cooled down a
while (excessive heat can cause problems as well as shorten the life of
the drive), fscking the drive, in the case of SCSI, low-level formatting
the drive (which nukes all data!), checking the disk surface of the
drive... Anything and everything I can think of to make sure the drive
is healthy. In my workstations, I'll make sure the drives are 100%
dependable; drives in test boxes can be fiddled with and be spotty. If
you don't trust the drive 100%, don't use it 'in production'.

Also, don't overlook the beauty of magnetic tape for your very important
data. What else could possibly outlast magnetic tape?

Adam
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Received on Sun Oct 10 22:14:50 2004

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