On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Paul Hartman <paul.hart...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I've got an external USB hard drive adapter that apparently have been > going bad, or maybe the drive is going bad, I don't know... It has > died a few times in the last week. During that time I've been burning > DVDs and trying to copy all of the data off of it, but it choked with > about 130gb remaining and now, after hooking up a new adapter, XFS > won't mount it. :( It's full of pictures and home movies and stuff. > Sadly, this drive was part of my backup strategy. The files were all > consolidated on this disk, where I was sorting and organizing them > into nice DVD-sized chunks. I guess I wasn't fast enough.
As an update, the Windows tool was totally useless and called it an unsupported partition type despite the website's claim to support XFS. I think it just scans the raw data and looks for signatures of JPG/AVI/MP3/etc on the disk, regardless of filesystem. The files it "recovered" had no filenames and would not have been fun to sort through. Now the good news, after making a backup of the drive, which miraculously completed without errors, I ran xfs_repair on it and it was able to locate the secondary superblock after about 30 minutes of scanning the disk. The log was corrupt, of course, so I had to zero it out, then mount followed by a clean unmount, then mount read only :) after that I have 99% of my files in tact. The most recently-written files before the last crash were lost, but everything else was there and is being copied off as we speak. :) As for the failure, I think the mechanics of the drive itself are going bad. There were no bad sectors, but using 3 different power sources the drive still has problems starting up about 2/3rd of the time. It's like a car that won't start. You can hear it trying to spin up, dying, trying again, dying, etc. What I don't know is if the cheap USB adapter could have passed some "dirty" electricity through to the drive and fried it somehow. Thanks to all who replied! Paul
