[Linux-disciples] Lost Inodes and Hard Drive Failure Questions

[Adam Kessel]

I had a recent catastrophic hard disk failure (I think it was
catastrophic anyway).

After running e2fsck a few times, things seem to have settled down.  I'm
waiting for a replacement drive to get all remaining data off.

A few questions:

The e2fscks created several thousand files in /lost+found.  As best I can
tell, these files are actually OK.  Many of them are music files and play
fine.

I assume by definition "lost and found" files have lost their
directory/filename information, but I'm wondering if there is any
possible way to recover that information.  Renaming and moving thousands
of files doesn't sound like a fun way to spend the summer.  Fortunately,
I can use the ogg/mp3 metadata in most cases to minimize the effort, but
I'm wondering if anyone with a better understanding of filesystems (this
one was ext3) knows of any way to recover this information.

Once I get all the data off, I'm wondering what the best way is to
determine whether the drive just needs to be junked.  It's a 200.0G
drive, and less than one year old, so if it's still useable I'd like to
keep it.  I know e2fsck -c will mark unuseable bad blocks.  Is there some
"stress test" that anyone can recommend to see if the drive is likely to
fail again?

Interestingly, there is absolutely nothing in the logs indicating what
actually went wrong.  I woke up one day to find the drive remounted
read-only, and then lots of errors on e2fsck.  Also, cfdisk is unable to
read the disk's partition table.  The drive appears to be functioning
perfectly well now as I recover the data onto a known good drive.
-- 
Adam Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.bostoncoop.net/pipermail/linux-disciples/attachments/20040619/cca44ffb/attachment.pgp