Ok, so Emmy read my entry for the other day, and said,”You really should put a step by step instruction on your blog.” So, I thought about it, and thought she was right. After all, I did link to a lot of places with a lot of good info, but what if those places go away? So, here is a step by step of what I did to recover my dying drive.
- Put old drive back in as slave. Make sure you have enough room on your master drive for the entire old drive, freespace and all.
- Boot up your main drive. The failing one probably will not mount, that is why you are trying to rescue it, right? However, you will need to know what device it is. If it is actually the slave off the master, it will probably be /dev/hdb something. So goto a konsole and type mount, that will give you a list of all partitions, mounted or not that are available on your system. Find the one you are looking to recover.
- Type : dd_rescue /dev/hdb3 /home/mine/Backups/olddrive.img
The Command, The device, This is the directory you want it backed up to. - Make sure the directory you are backing up to has plenty of space on that partition. If you run out of space, you may not recover what you wanted.
- Watch it run… watch it run for a very long time… watch it stop on errors for a long time. Find something else to do.. Watch a movie or 10.
- When it finishes, you should be able to do an su or sudo depending what distro you are running. You need access to write to system areas and do admin tasks.
- losetup /dev/loop1 /home/travis/Backups/olddrive.img
- That will set the image you just created as a loop device.
- You will then want to mkdir /media/olddrive or whatever or where ever else you want to reference it.
- mount -t reiserfs /dev/loop1 /media/olddrive
- You will need to know something of the mount command, and what file system type you have. With Linspire, it was Reiserfs. Also, you can exit the console at this point if everything was successful.
- I was then able to open /media/olddrive in konq and see everything from my old drive and copy it off. I love Linux and ddrescue!
I hope this helps someone as much as all those other references helped me. At the very least it gives everyone one more place to possibly find what they need to know to save some important data! For good measure, here is another picture I recovered!
