[PLUG] Failed Go-Flex hard drive

[King Beowulf]

On 01/27/2013 05:50 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I have a Seagate 3TB Go-Flex USB 3.0 hard drive that has apparently
> failed. It still spins up, the light comes on, but none of the GUI file
> managers on Fedora or Ubuntu can display the contents. They give me the
> error message "Failed to open directory 'Movies'. Error when getting
> information for /media/Movies/moviefilename."
>
> The contents are old movies that I continue to seed. I noticed the
> other day that Ktorrent was complaining about a couple of them missing
> pieces, and I started worrying then. But otherwise it continued to
> function until just now when I returned home after taking my computer
> to PSU. The Go-Flex is connected to a USB port on the laptop dock, so
> as soon as I place the computer in the dock it is recognized. I have to
> mount it before I start Ktorrent, and now after mounting it appears
> mounted, but I can't read the contents. This happens on both my laptop
> and my desktop, using various USB ports, and after wiggling connections.
>
> I opened Palimpsest, which reported the Smart information as "Disk has
> a few bad sectors." I unmounted it and ran "e2fsck -p /dev/sdb" which
> reported "Bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/sdb:
> The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
> filesystem." (It is ext4.) The error message further suggested to run
> "e2fsck -b 8193 <device>." I have not tried this as I have no idea what
> this will do.
>
> It is not the end of the world if I lose everything on the disk (about
> 10 GB), but it would be annoying. And it is under warranty. But I could
> use some suggestions for things I can try with e2fsck or other tools
> before I give up. Any experts out there?
Sounds like your partition table got borked from a bad eject/umount.  if 
thats it, you can repair it.  There might be a few bad files, though, 
since you tried to keep using the drive.  Also, you might have a bad 
enclosure.  If it happens again, then a warranty swap might be in order.

Easiest, if you have a backup of the data, is to reformat.  Since it is 
3TB, I suggest setting up several partitions instead of just one big 
one.  Useful utilities (live distros also handy if your system wont boot):

http://partedmagic.com
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Both include numerous harddrive and other diagnostic tools, such as 
testdisk.  Testdisk is an excellent utility to recover partitions.

Bad superblock issues pop up often.  Before you get too deep, you can 
try something simple.  You can try to load one of the back up 
superblocks, there are several backup.  Which one you use will depend on 
your block size (8193 the superblock location for 1K blocks).  Your 3TB 
drive is no doubt formated with 4K blocks (4096 bytes).

find superblock locations:
|# dumpe2fs /dev/sda3 | grep superblock|

find block size:
|# dumpe2fs /dev/hda2 | grep 'Block size'|

http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/repair-a-broken-ext4-superblock-in-ubuntu/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/surviving-a-linux-filesystem-failures.html

Have fun!
Ed