[gentoo-user] Re: Desperately need advice on fixing a corrupt XFS partition

[Paul Hartman]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman@×××××.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've got an external USB hard drive adapter that apparently have been
> going bad, or maybe the drive is going bad, I don't know... It has
> died a few times in the last week. During that time I've been burning
> DVDs and trying to copy all of the  data off of it, but it choked with
> about 130gb remaining and now, after hooking up a new adapter, XFS
> won't mount it. :( It's full of pictures and home movies and stuff.
> Sadly, this drive was part of my backup strategy. The files were all
> consolidated on this disk, where I was sorting and organizing them
> into nice DVD-sized chunks. I guess I wasn't fast enough.

As an update, the Windows tool was totally useless and called it an
unsupported partition type despite the website's claim to support XFS.
I think it just scans the raw data and looks for signatures of
JPG/AVI/MP3/etc on the disk, regardless of filesystem. The files it
"recovered" had no filenames and would not have been fun to sort
through.

Now the good news, after making a backup of the drive, which
miraculously completed without errors, I ran xfs_repair on it and it
was able to locate the secondary superblock after about 30 minutes of
scanning the disk. The log was corrupt, of course, so I had to zero it
out, then mount followed by a clean unmount, then mount read only :)
after that I have 99% of my files in tact. The most recently-written
files before the last crash were lost, but everything else was there
and is being copied off as we speak. :)

As for the failure, I think the mechanics of the drive itself are
going bad. There were no bad sectors, but using 3 different power
sources the drive still has problems starting up about 2/3rd of the
time. It's like a car that won't start. You can hear it trying to spin
up, dying, trying again, dying, etc. What I don't know is if the cheap
USB adapter could have passed some "dirty" electricity through to the
drive and fried it somehow.

Thanks to all who replied!

Paul