[mythtvnz] Looks like my system drive is faulty - ideas?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2012 21:33:51 +1200, you wrote:


>Slightly red-faced here. (1) Had a mental block about how you could 
>possibly mkdir on a read only cd. Duh! Anyway I can mount the two good 
>drives. Red face (2): It seems I moved my system from the bad/old drive 
>to one of the working drives some time ago so all is not lost. Totally 
>forgot about this. Just need to get booting from the relevant disk 
>working. Seems the Grub MBR was on the bad drive so need to create it on 
>the good drive, configure and I should be up again.

I have to say that I have been there too.  For a long time my grub was
on my sda drive, which has not been my system drive for many years.
When I upgraded sda from a 1 Tbyte drive to a 2 Tbyte one, I was
scratching my head for quite a while trying to figure out why it would
not boot.  Eventually I figured it out and set the BIOS to boot from
sdd and everything worked.

So how bad does the bad drive look?  Can you read it at all?  If you
can, then you may be able to get off a lot of data.  I have had to
deal with several SATA drives that have been degraded, but not yet
dead, and I found the best tool was ddrescue (not dd_rescue).  In my
case, the drives were suffering from many bad sectors (increasing
hourly), and I got warnings from SMART in time to stop writing to the
drive and copy off all the data.  I have copied an almost full 2 Tbyte
drive with ddrescue, and wound up with only 6 damaged (but still
playable) recordings, despite having more than 300 bad sectors.  It
took several days for ddrescue to do that, but compared to any other
recovery method I have used, ddrescue is a dream come true.  I was
able to run ddrescue in the background copying from my bad drive to my
new replacement one, while the rest of the system was happily running
MythTV.  Of course, until I recovered the drive, the list of programs
came up with lots marked with an X icon saying they could not be
found, but everything else just worked.

To get ddrescue, install the gddrescue package (not the ddrescue
package).