Hi,
This was from a private email between Joe and myself - but as he says,
there's plenty of disk / Unix experts on the list that might be able to
answer this one!
We were talking about the possibility of doing a raw backup of the failing
disk in my Tek system and restoring it onto another disk to get it to
work...
> > I can
> >get a 400MB disk dump from the drive by using dd on my linux system - but
> is
> >that any use? Assuming I could even find an identical drive as a
> >replacement, even if I did something like catting the raw image to the
> new
> >disk, I'm not sure if that would give me something that would work (I'd
> >still have the filesystem corruption too, but that's a separate problem)
> >
> >Do disks as read by dd appear as a bunch of linear sectors, regardless of
> >drive parameters (heads, tracks etc.) - if that's the case then maybe I
> have
> >no problem; maybe I can even use any old drive providing it's the same
> size
> >or larger than the original disk? OK, I won't be using the full capacity
> of
> >the drive, but I don't really care :) (I have about 6 SCSI drives
> sitting
> >unused because I don't have space to put them in my main PC)
> >
> >I'm just thinking about inode tables and stuff and how they will probably
> >get screwed up trying to do any raw copying...
>
What would be ideal would be if everything's just a linear bunch of blocks
as far as dd and inode tables etc. are concerned - nice theory that I could
use a different drive to replace the failing one, but I'm sure this wouldn't
work! Anyone?
The other thing I mentioned to Joe was the filesystem check - I remember at
one point I could boot the Tek to single-user mode (throwing up a lot of
filesystem errors along the way) and then run fsck - that'd give a lot of
faults, but not correct them; any ideas how to do this? I'm fairly sure the
system wouldn't even go to single-user last time I tried though.
>From memory I managed to read all but a single block of data from the drive
in a linux system a couple of years ago (might even still have that dump
someplace) with a few retries, so if that block wasn't on something
criticial, if I can get the raw data onto another drive somehow and if I can
fix the filesystem I might be able to get a working system again (that's a
few too many ifs though!)
cheers
Jules
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Received on Wed Feb 14 2001 - 07:20:56 GMT