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

[David Moore]

On 24/06/2012, at 11:41 PM, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

> 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).
> 
> 
Alas I think the drive is pretty sick. I tried hot plugging it again and it locked up the system until I unplugged it. So I doubt whether I can recover anything off it. Might see if I can find someone who has better tools than I for disk recovery/repair. Or just write it off as a lesson in making backups, not that I back up recordings anyway.