[PLUG] IDE drive - "hard error reading fsbn..." - recoverable?

[Aaron Burt]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 08:48:46PM -0500, David Fleck wrote:
[System freezes, now things don't work right]
> So I figure somehow I suffered hard drive damage in the system freeze or my 
> reboot.  My questions, now, are:
> 
> Is this likely a one-time thing, or a symptom of creeping disk death?
>   (The 'hard error' messages only started after the reboot.)

Most likely the system froze *because* of the HDD errors.

> If it's one-time, is the disk still usable?  Can I flag the affected 
> sectors as bad, and work around them?

Modern HDDs hide bad sectors from the system by mapping around them.
If you see bad sectors on a drive, it's already on its way to an early
grave.  Copy off what you can, then throw it away or turn it into art.

> How can I best determine the extent of the damage? I'd rather not do a 
> manual fsck for a whole afternoon if I can help it.
> 
> How best can I recover from the damage?  Many of the affected files appear 
> to be in my home directory.  Can I just blow away the entire /home/dcf and 
> restore from backup (I think I have those...)?  The system appears to be 
> largely functional - I'm using it to write this e-mail, for instance, and 
> mozilla works ok (though with many error messages being written to syslog).

OK, some imperative advice: 
Don't power up the bad drive unless you absolutely have to.  There may
be crud floating around inside, destroying more data the longer it's
spinning.  Don't write to it, either, since you're risking serious
filesystem corruption.  Get another drive, install an OS and then
install the bad one and copy what you can over to the new drive.

-- 
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than
any invention in human history, with the possible
exceptions of handguns and tequila.
        -- Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992