drive has gone in UBUNTU??

[techead]

I'm new to linux and all the terminal commands and mounting etc etc. its all very weird to me :erm:

anyway, I installed the latest Ubuntu on a 250gb drive that I have. everything installed fine

the purpose of the installation was to try recover some data off a 320gb drive that I have had lying around for a VERY long time. I have heard the power of ddrescue and wanted to put it to the test, limited linux knowledge and all

I decided to follow this guide http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-recover-data-even-when-hard-drive-is-damaged/

I followed it to the T, and during the first step all THREE drives picked up. The OS drive, the screwed drive and a 1TB drive to catch the image onto. I got to the ddrescue command, and ran it. It ran for about an hour before I figured out that it wasnt actually doing anything.. lol It simply kept ticking up the minutes from last successful read, which was not right. The fact that the recovered was not going up, and the error rate was the full 320GB... I knew something was up. Screenshot below, and also one of the destination drive. It has an error... :wtf:

see here and here

So I tried to reformat the 1TB using the GPUParted thingy, using EXT3 (as directed) and I got an error. So I tried formatting the drive NTFS and that worked!!! So I restarted the PC so I could begin the entire process from the beginning (excluding the formatting part)

So now the 320gb drive is no longer picking up... It WAS picking up when I ran through the whole process... but I made a mistake somewhere along the line I think?

I have run those two commands, and that 320gb drive is not listed. Also in the GNUParted app, also not listed.

please help

(this is what Im using)

 

[MyWorld]

First screenshot, you tried to mount the drive and not the partition, which is impossible.

You:
mount /dev/sdb test

Should be:
mount /dev/sdbx test (Replacing x with partition number, in all likelihood it was sdb1)

I cannot see the full ddrescue command, so cannot comment on that.

What does dmesg tail show?

Also, what does ls /dev/sd* show?

 

[techead]

First screenshot, you tried to mount the drive and not the partition, which is impossible.

You:
mount /dev/sdb test

Should be:
mount /dev/sdbx test (Replacing x with partition number, in all likelihood it was sdb1)

I cannot see the full ddrescue command, so cannot comment on that.

What does dmesg tail show?

Also, what does ls /dev/sd* show?

yay someone replied

ok one thing at a time please

you said

First screenshot, you tried to mount the drive and not the partition, which is impossible.

but the article said

After formating, mount the destination drive, create a “recovery” directory, and get inside it. To do this execute the following commands one by one (some of these commands may require sudo in front):

sudo mkdir mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda mnt
cd mnt
sudo mkdir recovery
cd recovery

?

 

[guest2013-1]

99% of all linux articles out there is somehow misleading or not up to date. I had to mash up several articles before I actually found the correct steps to implement a slave MySQL server for example.

If I were you I'd read up more on your particular issue.

 

[MickZA]

I'd say the 320GB drive now requires professional data recovery if GParted can no longer see it, linux assistance isn't going to help here

 

[techead]

no man its not that. I havent written to the drive, its just some stupid linux mounting drama or something that I have done that has now screwed things up...

Im gonna figure this out if its that last freakin thing I do

 

[Lupus]

Do an fdisk -l, this will list the drives plugged in, look at the drive you want to mount, it should tell you disk size. then type in mount /dev/sda1 or what ever the partition is, it should look something like this

/dev/sda1 * 1 64 512000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 64 7180 57158656 8e Linux LVM

After you've done the mount do a df -h and it should show you the partitions listed.

 

[MickZA]

GParted will see a drive if it's mounted or not - it has all the tools to mount / unmount contained in it's GUI. If it can't see the drive it's either not plugged in or gone "belly up".

edit: thrashing the drive with ddrescue could have been the final straw

 

[ponder]

Yes post the output of sudo fdisk -l here for starters.

Which version of ubuntu are you using? Are you running it from the livecd or have you installed it?

 

[MyWorld]

First off, we can do nothing if your drives are not recognised, so give me the output of dmesg tail and ls /dev/sd*

Once we have that we can figure out what went wrong with your drives and then we can start over on ddrescue.

The article you linked to is not very complete and leaves out a few elementary steps, but we will get to that later. Lets first get your drives online.

Edit:
I had this open a while before replying, so there are a lot of replies before mine, but yes, give us:
dmesg - to see if there is any chipset module/drive/whatever conflict that does not want to recognise the disks
fdisk -l - to see the drives attached to the machine, you can leave out ls /dev/sd* if you do the fdisk command.
BIOS - is the drives picked up in the BIOS?

 

[ponder]

Oh, please stop using screenshots for terminal output, rather copy and past the output to pastebin http://paste.ubuntu.com/

 

[techead]

thank you gentlemen for all the replies. this is why I love this forum!

I will be leaving the office in 1 hour, then I will post all the details from home

 

[techead]

First off, we can do nothing if your drives are not recognised, so give me the output of dmesg tail and ls /dev/sd*

Once we have that we can figure out what went wrong with your drives and then we can start over on ddrescue.

The article you linked to is not very complete and leaves out a few elementary steps, but we will get to that later. Lets first get your drives online.

Edit:
I had this open a while before replying, so there are a lot of replies before mine, but yes, give us:
dmesg - to see if there is any chipset module/drive/whatever conflict that does not want to recognise the disks
fdisk -l - to see the drives attached to the machine, you can leave out ls /dev/sd* if you do the fdisk command.
BIOS - is the drives picked up in the BIOS?

right, so here is the info you needed

info to the questions here here and here

yes the drive picks up in the BIOS

so from what I can see the drive is there, as /dev/sdc but its got a load of I/O errors so its not picking up in Gparted

worth pointing out that I am running an installed version of Ubuntu 11.10 on a 250gb hard drive (/dev/sda) and a 1tb hard drive (/dev/sdb)

 

[ponder]

I'll be honest in saying I have no idea on how to mount sdc as I have never had a situation like this. What file system is it using, maybe you can force mount it?

Is the drive connected via usb or sata?
Full make & model of the drive?

You could try the ddrescue mailing list but I suspect this drive is past the point of home recovery and you might have to send it to someone like South_Bit, hopefully I'm wrong though.

 

[MickZA]

... worth pointing out that I am running an installed version of Ubuntu 11.10 on a 250gb hard drive (/dev/sda) and a 1tb hard drive (/dev/sdb)

For future reference SystemRescueCD is a bootable Linux CD jam packed with useful utilities including all those mentioned here - worth having a copy around for problems like this.

SystemRescueCD: http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

 

[SouthBit]

I haven't read through every last bit of info in this thread, but with ddrescue all that is needed is:

* run sudo fdisk -l to see which drive is which
* run ddrescue, with a log file if you want, such as: sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb for example

The fact that you got ddresuce working at some point but it didn't rescue any data means that this drive is beyond what ddrescue can do. ddrescue is a software imager - all commands sent to the drive have to pass via the OS and the BIOS. OS and BIOS have very limited control over a drive.

What is needed is a hardware imager which was made for this exact purpose - unfortunately they cost about R40,000+

If you want to keep playing with this drive and risk losing the data forever then try imaging the drive in reverse with ddrescue, if you can get it to that point.

Other than that, if the data is valuable it really does need the treatment of professional data recovery equipment.

NB: The more you work with a failing drive, the more it degrades and you risk damaging the drive to a point that it is not recoverable at all. Degradation happens very quickly, be warned.

 

[techead]

snip

patiently waiting for your reply...

because I dont believe this is the end of the road.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1470970

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1651369

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=625922

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=51496

[ 177.044476] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled error code
[ 177.044479] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 177.044484] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20 00
[ 177.044495] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0

identical to

[ 2377.833689] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[ 2377.833695] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[ 2377.833708] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 0f a7 00 00 08 00
[ 2377.833745] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 4007

something bloody weird going on here :wtf:

 

[SouthBit]

I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0

Why are you surprised that you are getting I/O errors on a failed drive?

 

[Elimentals]

I haven't read through every last bit of info in this thread, but with ddrescue all that is needed is:

* run sudo fdisk -l to see which drive is which
* run ddrescue, with a log file if you want, such as: sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb for example

The fact that you got ddresuce working at some point but it didn't rescue any data means that this drive is beyond what ddrescue can do. ddrescue is a software imager - all commands sent to the drive have to pass via the OS and the BIOS. OS and BIOS have very limited control over a drive.

What is needed is a hardware imager which was made for this exact purpose - unfortunately they cost about R40,000+

If you want to keep playing with this drive and risk losing the data forever then try imaging the drive in reverse with ddrescue, if you can get it to that point.

Other than that, if the data is valuable it really does need the treatment of professional data recovery equipment.

NB: The more you work with a failing drive, the more it degrades and you risk damaging the drive to a point that it is not recoverable at all. Degradation happens very quickly, be warned.

^ This

and looking at

I/O error, dev sdc, sector 0

Tells me you should rather take it in, you dont have a software issue.

 

[techead]

Why are you surprised that you are getting I/O errors on a failed drive?

if you bothered to read the rest of what I took the time to write, you would see that plenty of other people are getting this I/O error on sector 0, and its got stuff all do with a failing device.

Am I saying that mine is NOT failing? No Im not. Im not the proff here, apparently you are.

Seriously, if you not bothered to read everything, then rather keep the comments to yourself

thanks