My USB HD failed; all my puppy stuff unreachable

[tallboy]

HELP!
My old machinery is falling apart! I need immediate assistance.

I have a LaCie 160Gb USB harddisk, that has been acting strange lately, and I have managed to partly back up some of it. The HD has one USB connection, which is sufficient when running from a USB2 port, and one power connection which can be used with an extra USB connector or a powersupply, when running from a USB1 port. The HD is a Seagate 2.5" SATA unit. The electronics inside the box failed, and the HD would run irregular or not start at all.

I have 3 partitions formatted as ext2 or ext3, with all my puppy stuff and genealogy bases on it, and 1 as vfat.

I removed the HD and had it tested in a Windows mahcine in a PC repair shop (I had no cables myself), it found all partitions, and it was declared OK.

I bought an external 2.5"/3.5" IDE/S-ATA to USB adapter, fired up my puppy, and connected the HD. The HD's partitions are not recognized. The only symbol showing, is for the /mnt/sdc4 partition.

When running gparted, all file systems are unknown, see image below. But when hovering the mouse over the sdc4 symbol on the desktop, it says filesystem vfat, 4.7 Gb.

I have not done anything else yet, I hope someone with first hand knowledge can advice me on what to do, so I don't screw up more.
Is there help in running fschk?
Why is there 2.49 Mb unallocated diskspace?
Should I risk Gparted running a Data Rescue Attempt?
Are there better tools for the job?

tallboy

[Karl Godt]

Unallocated are the bits that did not fit into a partition at setup time .
gparted uses or is like parted commandline , which is a very rough-size partitioning tool in my experience .
fdisk is much more accurate, but dependent on fdisk version or busybox fdisk the default values cause some unallocated space
ie . partition starts at 100GB but the default puts it some 1-4KB after the appropriate cylinder, sector or head ,
which gives the opportunity to put in stage1_5 grub files after the mbr of the partition without writing into the superblock of the partition .

I am hoping that someone would correct me andor describe it better .

*

For your USB HDD : I think that USB is risky.
USB tend to be untight in my experience .
Some vibrating push against the table and the USB disconnects for a microsecond , harming the filesystem if mounted at that time .

Had such too with an USB adaptor towards IDE HDD . Was able to rescue things with teskdisk copy function i think , but was no fun to use testdisk to me . The OS keeping running is best to rescue things. Things get worse if you poweroff or reboot in my few experiences .

*

Please open /proc/partitions and /proc/diskstats to look if they are mentioned there . udevd might have deleted the partition nodes in /dev/ directory , too ! Check that also !

[tallboy]

Thank you Karl.
As you see from the images below, both /proc/partitions and /proc/diskstats are present, and they are present in /dev also, and fdisk show them also.

tallboy

the output of fdisk -l:
# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 122 979933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 123 1035 7331840 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 * 1035 4871 30809088 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 243 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 * 244 5354 41054107+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 5355 11190 46877670 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 11191 14593 27334597+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 4863 39062016 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 4864 9726 39062047+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc3 9727 18844 73240335 83 Linux
/dev/sdc4 18845 19457 4923922+ b W95 FAT32

[Karl Godt]

Then I would run fsck on the ext* partitions . BUT fsck -n -f -v /dev/sdc1 : -n for not doing anything to get a first overview . Windows chkdsk and Linux fsck are pretty similar leaving lots of files renamed to numbers .
Horrible to get them renamed back to their original names

[tallboy]

Not much luck with that, Karl. I never used Windoze, but I have an old HD with Win XP on it, somewhere , I'll see what happens when I run it.

# fsck -n -f -v /dev/sdc1
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdc1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

# fsck -n -f -v /dev/sdc2
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdc2
Could this be a zero-length partition?

# fsck -n -f -v /dev/sdc3
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdc3
Could this be a zero-length partition?

I tried with fsck.ext2 and fsck.ext3 also with same result.

tallboy

[Monsie]

Hi tallboy,

Are there better tools for the job?

Here is an old thread regarding ddrescue which might also be a workable solution for you... Note that aragon compiled the PET in Puppy 4.3.1 but also provides a link to the source code if need be.

Monsie

[Sylvander]

Here's my thread about my successful 1st use of ddrescue.
It did a great job; was easy to use even though at the beginning I knew nothing about how to get it to do stuff.
I was impressed.

[Karl Godt]

Code: Select all

e2fsck -f -n -v -b 32768 /dev/sdc1

Had googled a bit . Normally IIRC fsck tells you that you could try a backup superblock .

bash-3.00# dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 | grep -i backup | cut -f1 -d,
dumpe2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
Journal backup: inode blocks
Backup superblock at 32768
Backup superblock at 98304
Backup superblock at 163840
Backup superblock at 229376
Backup superblock at 294912
Backup superblock at 819200
Backup superblock at 884736
Backup superblock at 1605632
Backup superblock at 2654208
Backup superblock at 4096000
Backup superblock at 7962624
Backup superblock at 11239424

as a list of superblocks example for a 50GB partition of mine .

Dunno, since I knew it, it probably did not work that time .

Here is anotther thread : GParted has lost a partition. How to get it back?

Good Luck anyways !

[tallboy]

Thank you, guys.
I'll try out the suggestions, and report back.

An additional question: My PC has IDE bus, but the USB disc is SATA. The adapter is a dutch Konig 2.5"/3.5" IDE/S-ATA to USB2.0. I have a 4-port USB2.0 card with auto speed detection in the PC.
I cannot really see how, but could there be some limitations involved in reading from the SATA disk?

tallboy