Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Hard drive failure, recover data

[GeXus]

I just recently had a hard drive failure that produced the following error

root@re:/# mount /dev/hda3 /mnt
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda3,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 4410069
Buffer I/O error on device hda3, logical block 8259
hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: 0xb0



The host is going to mount this HD on the same machine after adding a new hard drive and fresh install... Does anyone have any recommendations for how I can go about recovering data? Specifically mysql databases?

[stdunbar]

You'll need to go to your backups. You might be able to get data off of the old drive but that data would be suspect in my opinion. Going to your backups is likely to be safer.

[GeXus]

I don't have backups...

[GeXus]

If anyone here thinks they would be able to recover the data and would be available in a few hours, please PM your rates. It's pretty important that I get this data. And yes I am adding this to lessons learned in regards to backups.

There is not much data and its plain text so should be fairly easy to determine if it is corrupted. It's also only about 50MB at most in size.

[Adam-AEC]

You might have decent luck using dd_rescue to create an image of the drive, and then fsck/mount it loop back.

If it's the primary drive, you might have to setup a kvm on it and boot from a live cd to access the drive raw.

I've had good success with this method, as long as the drive is detected by the BIOS.

You can find dd_rescue here:
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

[StevenG]

Can probably use plain old dd with the noerror option too.