Hello folks!
I had a short power cut and my HDD colapsed... But not completely. It is still being recognised by BIOS, but doesn't work when I try to load my Linux.
Have a look at the picture please and tell me what shall I do now to get it back or at least get some of it back and what is wrong with it:

This thing goes for very long time and linux had never actualy managed to boot up... Could you possibly have some knowledge about this kind of problem?
Thank you very much for any piece of information!

The main problem which I can see in those messages, is that sector (LBA) 1272781818 is unreadable (UNC error); the other messages are a consequence of that error. A sector becoming unreadable after a power-cut is expected, if that sector was in the process of being written

You have a choice of the next steps, depending on the value of the data to you, your skills, available equipment, your attitude to risk etc. etc. etc. DIY recovery attempts have risks, and you could change a relatively easy recovery into a much harder (and more expensive) one, or even cause permanent data loss, through incorrect procedures, misunderstandings (ours or yours), or just bad lack etc. If you don't want to take any risks with your data, or you don't want to take responsibility if something goes wrong, then use the services of a DR professional.

If you decide to accept those risks of DIY then, for example, you could clone that [source] drive (or at least the relevant partition) to another suitable blank or unneeded [target] drive - then perform any further logical recovery steps on that [target] drive. Obviously you expect that (at least) one sector will be unreadable from the original [source] drive. For that cloning, personally I would use GNU ddrescue run from a different drive (do not write anything to the original [source] drive!), with logging enabled.

Or you could risk booting a live Linux CD/DVD/USB, try to mount the affected filesystem (preferably read-only) directly from the affected drive, and if successful, copy the files from there onto other storage (locally attached or NFS etc.). Other options are also possible, so you may get different suggestions from other members.

From that screenshot you have supplied, I cannot tell what that unreadable sector contains (although that can be discovered), so it could contain important filesystem metadata for the filesystem on that partition; or it could contain part of a vital Linux file. Either of those being unreadable could cause Linux to be unbootable from the affected filesystem, as you describe.

Good luck!

P.S. Do not run fsck on that unbootable filesystem, at this stage.

Good Morning and thank you Vulcan. I have tried to run Clonezilla live CD, but it wants to read this partition (SDA8). Is there a chance to make it ignore this one? Because it seems to be infinitive process...
I haven't done any fsck check as I cannot get into the thing...

DD instead, with noerror (you might be lucky @ the end) while your accepting the DIY as they mentioned before.

good luck

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

@astratow,


There have been many previous threads on the forum discussing cloning, and mentioning suitable (as well as unsuitable) tools, and some of the factors for you to consider in the choice of cloning tool. Personally I wouldn't use dd for several reasons, but it's up to you. Whatever cloning tool you use, if it is unfamiliar to you then it can reduce your risks of human error with the "real" cloning, if you first practice using that tool to clone other disks (containing unimportant data) first.

Personally I don't use the Clonezilla live CD (and as einstein9 mentioned, Clonezilla itself isn't a good choice for doing the cloning), but some live CDs will try to automount any filesystem that they find. I'm guessing that this is what you are describing, and that this process is failing - which means that (at least one of) the unreadable sector(s) is in the filesystem metadata in your "problem" partition. If my guess is correct, then you need to check whether that live CD has an option not to automount any visible partition (e.g. on your problem drive) at boot time, and use that option. This is one of the many many things that frequent users of such tools do automatically - I'll never remember all of them, so if you're looking for detailed instructions at each stage then I'm the wrong person to help you.


Glad you haven't run fsck, and I hoped the fact that this drive was unbootable had prevented you from doing that. There is a way you could run fsck, but as I said, don't (at this stage)

I think I have lost these partitions now.... PartitionImage only recognises some NTFS partitions, same as fdisk, Parted sees only one unalocated space, which is not even what suppose to be (about 200 gigs instead 1000)....