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Oops... UFS mount attempt as EXT2...

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InThrees

Member
Joined
Feb 14, 2003
Location
Southeast US
It was really really late one night and I was pretty tired, and I inadvertently attempted to mount a UFS slice as EXT2 with an ubuntu livecd. Needless to say it didn't work very well, and the mount operation more or less hung.

Despite the fact that I specified -r in the mount command, the drive gives click of death noises at boot now. I've been hesitant to try any troubleshooting before I get some advice on how to proceed. If at all possible I would very much like to recover as much of the files as I can. Step 1 will be installing FreeBSD on the machine in question on a different drive (server rebuild, no os on it currently, hence the live cd.) But the problem drive itself... (seagate 120gb eide)

I'm kicking myself for this stupid mistake. =( Anyway, any ideas?
 
I don't think the problems are related. I think this is a coincidence. No software operation should be able to physically damage a hard drive, and "click of death noises" generally represent serious mechanical hard drive failure, although often you can still get data off the drive for a while.

If the important data is on ext2/3 partitions, boot with Knoppix and try to copy it over a network via nfs or samba, or burn it to cd's/dvd's.

If the important data is on a UFS partition slice, do the same except boot with Freesbie (FreeBSD livecd).
 
Really? What about software OCing? That's a software operation that is known to damage a computer on occasion. If the software asked the hard drive to work harder than it was supposed to, it could easily damage it. That said, I'm having trouble imagining how mis-mounting a hard drive could do that. I've mis-mounted partitions before and never destroyed the drive as a result. So I'm puzzled about that.

InThrees, Do as MRD said and use live CDs instead of installing to spare drives. Its much easier and it's nice to have them on hand anyway.

If you've managed to corrupt the drives (no so likely), however, simply mounting them won't work. You'll need to use some data recovery suite. Any decent one should handle UFS so there should be no problem.
 
Really? What about software OCing? That's a software operation that is known to damage a computer on occasion. If the software asked the hard drive to work harder than it was supposed to, it could easily damage it.
The drive is always working as hard as it can besides seeking 100% of the time. Software can't ask it to "work harder", it just doesn't work like that ;)
 
You can't overclock a hard drive. =P The software tells the controller what it wants, which actually goes and gets info from the drive. You can't change how the controller seeks to read this bit or that off the drive platter.

Obviously, you can destroy data on a hard drive with software, but you don't get "death click" noises. That's for hardware failure.
 
The drive is always working as hard as it can besides seeking 100% of the time. Software can't ask it to "work harder", it just doesn't work like that ;)

MRD said:
You can't overclock a hard drive. =P The software tells the controller what it wants, which actually goes and gets info from the drive. You can't change how the controller seeks to read this bit or that off the drive platter.

Obviously, you can destroy data on a hard drive with software, but you don't get "death click" noises. That's for hardware failure.
MRD, I could have sworn you wrote 'hardware,' not 'hard drive.'
 
Even when talking about hardware in general, it's takes a pretty special class of software to damage hardware... namely, it has to be software that changes how the computer's hardware works on a low level, like increasing speeds and voltages to cpu's, turning off a fan, etc. I would really consider that damaging hardware by changing hardware.

Anyways, mounting a hard drive with the wrong fs in Linux generally just fails. I've mounted ufs partitions as ext2/3 (or tried) and it just fails. I'd strongly suspect the hard drive here was near death anyways.

I've been looking a lot into backup solutions lately (I might make a thread to discuss it soon). I read that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who have well designed backup systems and those who haven't yet experienced catastrophic hard drive failure.
 
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