Failed Drive - Can't Boot! HELP! #19341286

Hi all,

GREAT NEWS!!! I'm currently in the process of copying photos of my two childrens' birth from my cloned NAS drives connected to my PC onto an external hard drive!!!

So after my last post, I connected my drives again to my PC and booted into Knoppix from a CD (my native OS is Win7) and tried to browse the devices. I could read all the OS files and log files but they didn't mean all that much to me. I saw all kinds of symlinks to my shares, but obviously no data as they would be on other partitions. I'm no guru when it comes to this stuff so I get why I can't access it, but just didn't have the extra bit of knowledge to get me there. That and I didn't even know the state of my drives.

I buckled and decided to call a data recovery place. All the places I called had a minimum price tag of $1500. The upper range was from $3000 to $15,000!!! So I sent in my original drives to the 1500-3000 place. At this point I was fairly confident that recovery was possible since I was able to recover 99.4% of the failed drive and all I needed was two good drives, right?

So I got an email this evening with my quote...

One drive was found to have problems internal to the Head Disk Assembly. Another drive was found to have severe platter degradation. We will need to do whatever is required to get a read and create good images of both failed drives (this will improve the chances for a successful recovery rather than focusing on one drive only). We will then rebuild the RAID and try to put the files and directories back together to get them as close as possible to their original state. At the end of the process, we will provide you with a file list to review so you can approve the completion of work. The cost of the recovery will be $2,690 and the estimated time to complete your case is 9 business days.

That's all I needed to go over my options again. It wasn't only the qutoe but the explanation just didn't sit right with me. Before I got my second wind to try again myself, I was trying to devise a strategy to take my cloned drives into another place to see if they could verify anything that this company was saying. In any case, I decided to give it another whirl myself and boy am I glad I did.

Here's what I did to mount my volume under Knoppix (based mostly on this post):

• First I connected all three drives to my desktop computer (clones of my originals made with dd_rescue for the good two, and ddrescue in reverse for the bad one.) I guess I'm lucky to have had the spare SATA ports


• The I booted up with a Knoppix CD downloaded online


• I opened a root shell (from the knoppix menu.


• I typed the following sequence of commands:
  
  
  
  • lvm pvscan
  
  
  • lvm vgchange -ay c
  
  
  • lvm lvs
  
  
  • mkdir test
  
  
  • mount -o ro /dev/mapper/c-c test
  
  


• At this point, the "test" directory I'd just created contains all my shares!!!

For completeness, here is the output of the entire ordeal including a listing of my precious shares:

root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# lvm pvscan
  PV /dev/sdd5   VG c   lvm2 [463.50 GiB / 0    free]
  PV /dev/sde5   VG c   lvm2 [463.50 GiB / 0    free]
  PV /dev/sdd6   VG c   lvm2 [1.36 TiB / 0    free]
  PV /dev/sde6   VG c   lvm2 [1.36 TiB / 5.00 GiB free]
  Total: 4 [3.63 TiB] / in use: 4 [3.63 TiB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# lvm vgchange -ay c
  1 logical volume(s) in volume group "c" now active
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# lvm lvs
  LV   VG   Attr     LSize Pool Origin Data%  Move Log Copy%  Convert
  c    c    -wn-a--- 3.63t                                           
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mkdir test
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# mount -o ro /dev/mapper/c-c test
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# cd test
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix/test# ll
total 104
-rw-------   1 root   root     7168 Aug 26 16:46 aquota.group
-rw-------   1 root   root     8192 Aug 26 16:46 aquota.user
drwxrwx---   7 nobody nogroup  4096 Jul 29 10:25 backup_orig
drwx------   3 nobody nogroup  4096 Dec 17  2006 backups
drwxrwx---  81   1003 libuuid  8192 Aug 24 13:00 docs
drwxrwx---  16 nobody nogroup  4096 Mar  5  2011 fsbackup
drwxr-xr-x   3     98      98  4096 Sep 22  2006 home
drwx------   2 root   root    16384 Sep 22  2006 lost+found
drwxrwxr-x   6 nobody nogroup  4096 Sep 17  2011 media
drwxr-xr-x 264 nobody nogroup 12288 Jul 29 10:25 music
drwxr-xr-x  40 nobody nogroup  4096 Jul 29 10:25 pictures
drwxrwx---  10   1003 libuuid  4096 Aug 11 17:45 software
drwxr-xr-x  13 nobody nogroup  4096 Nov  8  2010 video
drwxrwxrwx   6 nobody nogroup  4096 Apr  9  2007 vssdb
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix/test# 

I've only got a 500GB external available at this moment so I'm copying the critical things. I guess I'll politely decline the quote and ask the data recovery folks to ship my drives back. I'll have to pay the return shipping, but I haven't had to pay anything else at this point. As long as I get my critical files off, and I'll know soon enough (less than an hour and a half left in the copy), I'm good to go. My photos are now complete and I'm just waiting on my documents. :D

Once I receive my drives back I guess I'll try to recover all the remaining data back onto the good disks and then I can try to rebuild my ReadyNAS from scratch. At least now I've got the additional disks I can permanently mount in my PC and mirror from the NAS so this doesn't happen again!!!

Just as a side note I did see and skim the above post that helped me so much before; however, with my limited knowledge of Linux I didn't really get it and saw too many dissimilarities (like ReadyNAS version, disk images, etc...) that I didn't pay much attention. I came back to it when I got my quote and spent some more time researching the various parts of the processes and letting the whole thing sink in a bit more. Anyway, thanks to everyone who chimed in on this thread and all those who've posted before that provided a little piece of the puzzle in my head. A big shout out goes to mjw who was the poster of the thread linked above that really got me out of this mess.

I hope from here on in is a good news story, but things are looking bright so far. I hope this info can assist someone else if they run into an unfortunate circumstance similar to mine.

Cheers!