hard disk failure

[Matt Graham]

> technomage.hawke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> now I remember what the other tool was: hdparm. that tool will tell
>> you what the SMART status is on the HDD.
From: Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com>
> It seems to me everything is good. 
> hdparm /dev/sda1

hdparm won't tell you about the SMART status on a disk.  I think you may be
looking for /usr/sbin/smartctl , which will report the SMART status for
everything on sda if you call it with "smartctl -a /dev/sda".  However, the
last time one of my disks died, smartctl didn't say anything was wrong until I
started getting read errors on various sectors.

Also, if you're having trouble mounting an ext23 filesystem, something you
might want to try is to mount it using the backup superblocks.  "mount -t ext3
-o sb=131072 /dev/sda2 /mnt/somewhere" is the canonical first backup
superblock to try.  Or since reading the disk appears to be working, copy each
partition somewhere, make a copy of that copy, and attempt to work on that
copy with e2fsck and/or debugfs.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see