Re: a hosed reiserfs

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Vitaly Fertman wrote:

>Hello, 
>
>On Friday 25 June 2004 19:52, Bruce Israel wrote:
>  
>
>>OK, I've been hosed.  I had a disk crash, and my ReiserFS /home partition
>>doesn't mount (/dev/hdf8 on my machine).
>>
>>When I ran reiserfsck on it, I got an message saying it's a hardware
>>problem, with an I/O error that it can't read a block (output included
>>below).
>>
>>I don't really care about the disk (an 80 GB Western Digital), even though
>>I bought it within the past year, but I really want to get the data off of
>>it.
>>
>>Even though reiserfsck says there's a hardware problem on hdf8, I boot just
>>fine from that disk (using hdf1 and hdf7, my /boot and / partitions, both
>>ext3), and I can also successfully mount and read hdf9, another ReiserFS
>>partion.
>>
>>I installed a new disk that I'm booting off of until I can figure out how
>>to deal with this and not screw things further.
>>
>>I tried to follow the instructions in
>>http://namesys.com/bad-block-handling.html by copying the partition using
>>"dd_rescue /dev/hdf8 /home/bad-partition" (where /home is on the new disk).
>>It ran for a while and created a 4.5 GB file (it's a 20 GB partition, about
>>15GB used) and then hung my system (completely, couldn't switch VCs, no
>>other shells responding, etc.).  After powercycling I did it again, and got
>>the EXACT same behaviour, down to the exact same number of characters
>>copied into the 4.5GB output file.
>>
>>It also tried giving dd_rescue that byte count as the starting point, but
>>that also hung things.
>>
>>What can I do to recover my files?  Is there something else I can use to
>>dd_rescue the partition prior to running "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree"?
>>Maybe incrementing the byte count by 1K and writing in 1K of 0's?  Or
>>another invocation that would get it to read the data?
>>
>>Or something else that would get the data back?
>>
>>Also, if anyone has any advice on *things to avoid* that might potentially
>>lower the probability of data recovery, I'd appreciate it.  I've been very
>>cautious in what I do so that I don't exacerbate the problem. Thanks.
>>
>>Bruce
>>
>>======== reiserfsck output
>>
>>reiserfsck 3.6.11 (2003 www.namesys.com)
>>    
>>
>
>It would be better to use a newer version of reiserfsprogs.
>
>  
>
>>bread: Cannot read the block (4161536): (Input/output error).
>>    
>>
>
>what do you see in the syslog? any related message about IO 
>error or about an access beyond end of the device? It could also 
>be the case that the partition end is beyond the harddrive size. 
>check it please.
>
>  
>
Vitaly, hardware errors are only supported by us if they pay the $25...