[nmglug] drive problems

[Nick Frost]

BrianO'Keefe wrote:
> Hi all.
> Some of you may remember my firewire drive saga. It's still ongoing but
> I may have figured something out.

There is either physical damage to the drive (bad sectors on platter, 
controller, bad cache) and/or logical damage to the file system.

I second the "drive too full" isn't likely the problem, though I have 
seen one instance where a full HFS+ partition resulted in some pretty 
extensive logical damage to that HFS+ file system.  Theoretically since 
HFS+ is a journaling file system this is not supposed to happen.

Have you run the disk manufacturer's diagnostics on the drive?   If you 
are getting I/O errors that sounds like either bad sectors or incipient 
drive failure to me, unless those errors are caused by severe logical 
damage to the HFS+ file system and/or partition. Question: are you 
getting I/O errors only when trying to access the unreadable partition 
or when accessing the other two?

If Dot Foil could not recover any data, then chances are that the data 
on the partition is sufficiently damaged as to prevent recovery by 
normal means.

If I/O errors result in accessing that partition and there is reason to 
believe that the drive may be failing and/or have bad sectors, $1,500 to 
$2,000 spent at Ontrack.com or DriveSavers might be your only option. 
However, that money is best spent only when you have a drive that has 
failed manufacturers diagnostics, is known to have bad sectors, or won't 
spin up.

I would suggest trying to determine if the drive has hardware problems 
or bad sectors (manufacturer's diagnostics).

If it were me and it were possible to clone the partition to another 
drive without too many I/O errors, I would start there rather than 
perform such operations on an original data set with no backups (that 
way you have something to go back to if things go awry).

-Nick
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Nicholas S. Frost
7 Avenida Vista Grande #325
Santa Fe, NM  87508
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