On Mon, 4 Feb 2013, Erling Westenvik wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 11:11:17AM +0530, Girish Venkatachalam wrote:
> > I hate to say it but I am sure your hard disk is dying. Replace it ASAP
>
> No no, that's all right. Death is an inevitable part of life. I know the
> disk is dying and I'm going to replace it (or just throw away the
> machine which is a piece of junk anyway) but I'd love to get out of it
> the amendments to it's last will before it passes out completely.
>
> When a NON-ENCRYPTED disk has damaged areas one may still be able to
> access the undamaged areas upon a reboot - possibly by mounting it as a
> secondary disk on a working system and using various recovery tools,
> etc.
>
> However: the last time I had an ENCRYPTED disk with damaged areas, the
> whole disk got rendered useless. It wouldn't respond to
> keydisk/passphrase and hence there was no way to access "undamaged"
> data.
>
> The machine is still powered on. It still return ping but not ssh. When
> typing on the keyboard, characters get echo'ed on the screen. Do I have
> any options besides rebooting and praying?
None. Well, aside from a custom kernel.
One of the current "features" with softraid (regardless of discipline) is that
if a drive reports an I/O error, we mark the given chunk as being offline. In
the case of disciplines that have redundant data, this is exactly what we
want, since it should force failover to an online chunk. However, in the case
of disciplines that do not have dedundancy, the single chunk failure results
in the entire volume going offline.
I suspect this is what has happened. You have not mentioned how the crypto
volume is used, however I'm going to guess that you either have your entire
system on it, or at least some critical parts of your system. Since it has
gone offline things have stopped working and there is no way to recover from
this without rebooting.
I plan on changing softraid so that disciplines without redundant data simply
pass the failure from the underlying chunk up to userland, but leave the
volume state alone - after all, you can attempt to recover data from a online
volume, which is much more useful than losing the lot in one hit.
> > On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Erling Westenvik
> >
> > <erling.westen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have an old laptop configured with softraid encryption using a USB
> > > keydisk. The machine was never intended to be used for anything more
> > > than just testing. However, I started putting a few cvs repositories
> > > on it and slowly the machine became somewhat important.
> > >
> > > Today, when doing a cvs import of a little programming project on my
> > > web server, the ssh connection died in the middle of the transfer. I
> > > have not tried to restart it. This is whats on the screen right now.
> > >
> > > -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> > > 3187832; cn 820 tn 230 sn 42), retrying
> > > wd0: transfer error, downgrading to Ultra-DMA mode 4
> > > wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 4
> > > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890352 of 6890352-6890479
> > > (wd0 bn 1 3187832; cn 820 tn 230 sn 42), retrying
> > > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890391 of 6890352-6890479
> > > (wd0 bn 1 3187871; cn 820 tn 231 sn 18), retrying
> > > wd0d: uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 6890391 of 6890352-6890479
> > > (wd0 bn 1 3187871; cn 820 tn 231 sn 18), retrying
> > > softraid0: i/o error on block 6890352
> > > -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> > >
> > > Kind of self explaining: old machine with faulty disk! I do have
> > > backups but would like to have a copy of some recent commits.
> > >
> > > Switching console gives me a login prompt but after entering a user
> > > name and pressing enter the machine just hangs. The machine will answer
> > > to ping but not ssh.
> > >
> > > My question is:
> > >
> > > Do I have any options other than trying to reboot? Optionally into
> > > single user mode?
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > >
> > > Erling
--
"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.
Do not count on them. Leave them alone." -- Ayn Rand
