At 12:23 AM 12/29/2003 -0500, Madison wrote:

I have had a drive failure on a server and I can no longer mount the data partition on the hard drive (/dev/hda5 [ext3 under RH7.3]) because the replacement server (Fedora Core 1) claims that the drive's superblock is toast.

Sorry to hear about your hard drive and tape drive problems. Hopefully the recovery service will be able to help you. As was suggested earlier I was wondering if using one of the other superblocks would have helped you recover the files if the primary superblock was bad.

Now, before anyone rips me a new one, I -DO- have a tape drive but that, too, has rather depressingly failed. When I try to recover the files from the IDE Travan 8GB drive it successdully recovers about 50 files and then fails with this...

I don't have anything against using tape for backups but I do have something against tape drives. I have had four tape drives die on me. Actually, it was three drives. The fourth drive was made up of the two main pieces of two other identical drives that had previously failed in different ways. None of the drives had seen heavy usage. In fact, they had each been used for barely a dozen or so backups (IIRC). This is why I am now looking at the use of DVDs for backup. I already have software that allows me to backup everything in my Windows side of the machine to DVD. It backed up a bit over 6G on to two DVDs and the bonus is that they are bootable so I can recover from bare metal directly from the DVDs. I'm hoping to eventually be able to do something similar under Linux. One other difference between the use of tape and CD/DVD for backup is that the CD/DVD drives (AFAIK) are a lot cheaper to buy/replace should something happen to the drive. There is a place I know of which can repair the tape drives I have at a flat fee of $350 per drive. Only problem is, I don't have confidence that a repaired drive would last any longer then the new ones did. Cheers! Kevin. (http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/) Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 |"What are we going to do today, Borg?" E-mail:kcozens at interlog dot com|"Same thing we always do, Pinkutus: Packet:ve3syb-XXPEJ3/fxIc at public.gmane.org#con.on.ca.na| Try to assimilate the world!" #include <disclaimer/favourite> | -Pinkutus & the Borg -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml