data recovery recommendations, sick drive

Hugh_C

Hi,

I have a drive which has started acting up, a G-Raid mini which has been perfect until this morning, and some of the data has not been backed up elsewhere

Does anyone have a recommendation ofr data recovery? I'm of the opinion that the drive needs to be sent somewhere for the data to be extracted.

The drive will mount OK but then there's a message along the lines of "this drive cannot be repaired .... get your stuff off asap", but I'm getting a "file Busy" message when I try to copy stuff off.

I don't wan't to compound the problems by keeping it mounted.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Hugh

barryj

Maybe try mounting the drive in read-only mode. Then try and copy your files elsewhere. I think you'll need to use terminal to mount a drive read only. I don't have an external drive to try it on right now.

Is the disk operating in raid 1 or raid 0 mode? If it's the former, would removing the bad drive allow the good copy the mount?

Data recovery work is very expensive. If there are two drives in an array it's probably more expensive.

- barry

barryj

Just to give you an idea on how to try this - I don't have an extra drive, but just tried it with a .dmg, so should be pretty much the same:

Open a terminal window:

type: diskutil list

/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *83.9 MB disk1
1: Apple_HFS Opera 83.8 MB disk1s1

You need the name and identifier from the HFS partition. In this case Opera and disk1s1.

First you need to unmount the volume. Replace Opera in the next line with the name of your volume.

sudo umount /Volumes/Opera

You'll get prompted for your login password.
When done the volume should disappear from the finder.

Then run something like:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/MyDriveRO
sudo mount -t hfs -o rdonly /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/DriveRO

Make sure to replace 'disk1s1' above with whatever identifier you got earlier.

Your volume should now appear but will be read only. Try copying your files. If you're getting errors, try copying a smaller group of folders/files at a time.

- barry

ashleey

I have one of those drives and the connectors are notorious. It sounds obvious but have you checked the connections are secure? If you were accessing the drive while the connector moved that could explain your problem rather than hopefully not a failing disc and lost data.

Hugh_C

Thanks all for the tips,

Yes I had thought about the connectors, so I tried the other firewire port and also the USB2 port, no dice

I've been able to retrieve some of the stuff off it which is good, but only some. That Terminal voodoo would have me worried about losing the data irretrievably, so I might just bite the bullet and re-shoot, or send it off to the spin doctors (sorry) to see if they can retrieve the rest of the data. The Raid was in 0 mode (striped for exxxtra speed?) so I'm not sure of that makes it harder.

Anyway, lesson well and truly learnt, back the f*ckers up elsewhere onto a whole bunch of different media.

Thanks again, Hugh

barryj

Hugh_C wrote: »

I've been able to retrieve some of the stuff off it which is good, but only some. That Terminal voodoo would have me worried about losing the data irretrievably, so I might just bite the bullet and re-shoot, or send it off to the spin doctors (sorry) to see if they can retrieve the rest of the data. The Raid was in 0 mode (striped for exxxtra speed?) so I'm not sure of that makes it harder.

If the drives are in RAID 0, then data is interleaved between both drives. So I'd guess it will be more complicated/expensive to recover.

RAID 0 should never be used for anything that can't be replaced. RAID 1 is very useful as data is kept mirrored on both disks so one disk can fail and all data is still OK. Typically, you can just remove the bad disk and replace it with a new one and the data gets mirrored onto the new drive again.

- barry