Re: help for a wounded disk drive...

On Friday 21 March 2008 1:39 pm, William Bulley wrote:
I damaged a Seagate 80 GB EIDE drive that was attached to a FreeBSD 5.4
system (as ufs) some time ago, and I would like to recover the data on
this drive - if that is possible. All positive suggestions are welcome.

The drive is mechanically and electrically good. I just can't mount it
and use it under FreeBSD. It was a dual boot drive with a DOS partition
on the first partition and FreeBSD 5.4 on partition two. I did the normal
sysinstall for FreeBSD 5.5 as I had done many times before. Unfortunately,
I had the older, FreeBSD 5.4 drive cabled up (and powered up) on the second
IDE channel (using cable select) of an i386 motherboard while I did the 5.5
install on a new, blank drive on the first IDE channel.

I told sysinstall to add the standard FreeBSD bootloader on the new drive.
I don't recall if I allowed for a DOS partition or just used the entire
disk. The FreeBSD 5.4 disk on the second IDE channel also had the standard
FreeBSD bootloader from my earlier sysinstall of 5.4 on that disk.

When I completed the install, I figured I could just mount the second
(older) drive manually. When I tried to do this, things went from bad to
worse, and the new system could never recognize the drive. I believe the
installation process attempted to (or succeeded in) putting (an
unnecessary) bootloader on the older drive. Had it not been connected, it
would probably be okay today. I learned an important lesson at that time...

I don't know what steps to take to recover this drive so I can mount it in
a read-only mode. I just want to recover the files on this drive. It is
very small by today's standards, so I will likely not use the drive in
production.

I am comfortable running any required shell commands (as root), but I don't
want to damage the disk drive any further. I hope I don't have to resort
to using dd(1) on the raw device! Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Regards,

web...

--
William Bulley Email: web@xxxxxxxxx


If it's just a matter of grabbing data off this drive, would a live rescue CD
such as Reci=overy Is Possible be of help to you?

Dimitri

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