Troubleshooting a hard drive crash
I got a call today from a new client, M. Four years or so ago, M’s company bought a Linux-based file server from a local company that is now defunct. Some time ago, the mirrored drive went bad and the system kept running as Linux systems are wont to do. Unfortunately, the now-defunct company didn’t set up the machine for the standard practice of emailing periodic announcements of hardware status.
Sometime last week, the last drive died. M did the usual things to bring it back, but eventually took it to a data recovery company that was able to clone the drive. When M got the drive back to the office and put it in the machine, he got errors about “no superblock found on /dev/sda8″. He called me first thing this morning.
I won’t go into all of the gory details about diagnosing the problem; I’ll just give you the meat of the problem: when the system booted, the following were found:
- partitions sda6 and sda7 had errors
- partitions sda8 and sda9 complained of no superblock
- booting into Knoppix and running fdisk showed the following (block count omitted):
Device Boot Start End System /dev/sdb1 * 1 318 Linux /dev/sdb2 319 19929 Linux /dev/sdb5 319 445 W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sdb6 446 1719 Linux /dev/sdb7 1720 3631 Linux /dev/sdb8 3634 3635 FAT 16 < 32M
/dev/sda1 / /dev/sda8 /home /dev/sda9 /tmp /dev/sda6 /usr /dev/sda7 /var /dev/sda5 swap
From this data, you should be able to figure out what is wrong with the system.
Can you tell me how to fix it? 
I’ll tell you how I fixed it in a later post.
Tags: data recovery fdisk fstab hard drive crash Knoppix lost files
