Everything working for a year and suddently the HD doesn't mount

[bibi-phoque]

Hello,
Well something weird happened and I'm looking for advices. My setup is a WL500gp, WD 400GB and Wengi's tutorial (followed at the letter).
I have been using this for a year, my torrents are downloaded directly to the HD, the drive is accessible from Windows, I have a ftp server running and an http server.
Yesterday, I wanted to unzip a torrent file and during the process Samba crashed. I tried to reboot the router (connected on ssh) but something was stopping it from rebooting. I unplugged the router and plugged it back. Since, it's like my data partition (398GB) is gone. Windows doesn't see it, ftp server is not running. In command line, I can access /tmp/harddisk but there is only one folder there, transmission. The rest is gone. I had 300GB of data in there....

To see if the problem was a mount related issue, I connected the HD to another machine running Ubuntu. Ubuntu can see the HD, the 3 partitions, it can open the /opt but can't open the data partition. I get the following error:

Cannot mount volume
mount:wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. in some cases useful info is found in syslog -try dmesg|tail or so

What should I do? I don't think the disk could have been wiped out clean, maybe there is something wrong and it cannot mount... I just hope it's not a HD failure... :-(

The only thing that matters to me at this stage is to recover as much data as possible. Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

Thanks,
Yann

[gouryella]

The only thing that matters to me at this stage is to recover as much data as possible. Any suggestions on how to achieve this?
i am using this geek's 256KB software to backup partitions (yes u can backup EXT3 in win), better use some linux backup tool like dd (but i am windowsman)
http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm
after backup all partition except swap, from ubuntu run e2fsck -f -p /dev/*** for all partitions you have.

[bibi-phoque]

thanks for the tips, I didnt know I could backup an ext3 partition under windows. I definitly have to try this software once I find another HD big enough to store the backup.
Regarding e2fsck -f -p /dev/*** , is there a chance that this would erase data? Also, can this be run from the asus instead of ubuntu?

Cheers,
Yann

[gouryella]

thanks for the tips, I didnt know I could backup an ext3 partition under windows. I definitly have to try this software once I find another HD big enough to store the backup.
Regarding e2fsck -f -p /dev/*** , is there a chance that this would erase data? Also, can this be run from the asus instead of ubuntu?

Cheers,
Yann
it can be run inside of asus(but -p may be false), kill all running aplications, umount drive by


pre-shutdown
umount /opt
umount /tmp/harddisk
e2fsck -f /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part (device by fdisk -l)

answer (y) for repair
yes possible loose some data, not erase, only repair filesystem like scandisk or chkdsk!

[bibi-phoque]

Thanks!
Will give this a try when I come back home tomorrow.
Cheers,
Yann

[bibi-phoque]

hum...it doesn't look good. Here is what I'm getting with this command:

e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
Group descriptors look bad... trying backup blocks...
Block bitmap for group 640 is not in group. (block 265269)
Relocate<y>? y
yes

Inode bitmap for group 640 is not in group. (block 268789)
Relocate<y>? yes

Inode table for group 640 is not in group. (block 269925)
WARNING: SEVERE DATA LOSS POSSIBLE.
Relocate<y>?


I pressed yes all the way, but even after rebooting my files are not there...I'm loosing hope... What else could I try?

[gouryella]

i know good software for recovering files, partitions, etc: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk but it is running in command line and you must know what are you dooing.

backup is your salvation

[bibi-phoque]

Well thanks, I think I got most of my data back. For some reason, doing to pre-shutdown script was stopping stuff that shouldn't be stopped, because e2fsck would just die with a "no response from sender" message. Instead, I just unmounted /opt, and stopped most applications.
Running e2fsk, I pressed [Enter] for a very long time and once complete I rebooted. I can see most of my files now, ftp server and web server are up and running. Transmission doesn't start at reboot but this is a detail. I'm glad I got my stuff back!

Thanks a million!

Yann