[soup4you2]

I'm more than sure you all noticed my site went down again... this time due to hard drive difficulties..

upon bootup i get a message saying that it cannot read a certain block.. so naturally i run fsck on the drive. it says it cannot read the block and asks me to continue.. i say sure.. then once it's done it says filesystem is still dirty and to rerun fsck..

is there any good way to fix this with out replacing the entire hard drive.. the system is running on UFS2

any help would be sooo gladly appriciated... i really dont want to reload this puppie again...

[elmore]

What partitions are contained on this drive? All of em? When I've received this error it's always been due to bad sectors. I've typically added a second disk mounted it in the place of the bad disk, then mounted the bad disk in read only fashion, copied the data off. Now if all your partitions areon the same disk this won't really work. If you have like just /home on this disk it might be your quickest fix. I know Minion and frisco have both done lots with filesystem repair.

[soup4you2]

lets see the only 2 labels i'm having issues w/ are / and /var there seems to be other issues w/ the system to like a flaky power supply.. :( i have another pc i'm building guess i need to speed up the process...

Geeze didnt this just happen to me i start building a new pc and the old one craps out on me... talk about deja-vu

[frisco]

What elmore said should work, but for everything on that disk. Don't trust that disk without some extensive testing. If you boot from a rescue cd you should be able to copy over all the data from the bad disk to the new disk. For / and /var also compare to your backup to verify all files necessary are present and in working order.

If your power supply is also shot, well get a new one before more problems occur.

Once you get the bad disk out of the machine, first make sure you've backed up all data on the drive. For partitions that are still useable a dump or tar will suffice - if possible put it on something you can phsyically secure as read only (e.g. cd/dvd/tape). For the bad partitions use dd to try to copy all blocks from those parttions (use disklabel to determine those blocks).

Once you're confident you've backed up all data, look for the vendor's disk utility and run it. If it returns Bad Stuff, then hopefully you can return the disk under warranty. If it does not return Bad Stuff, run it a few more times. If the vendor utility returns ok each time, try calling the vendor on the off chance something is known-wrong with the utility or the drive model.

If that goes nowhere (e.g. - they won't send you a new drive under warranty) and you are feeling brave enough to continue using the drive, then before you use it at least run some tests of your own, like creating a partition across the whole disk and copying the same 1gb file until it's full, then md5 all the files to verify nothing changed. Any errors indicate Big Trouble ahead. No errors mean you might be ok using it, but i'd only use it in something i didn't mind fixing/replacing in the near future.

Be sure to label the drive appropriately and keep a log of what you did to it!

Good luck,

[soup4you2]

well last night i got the energy to try to do something with it.. i went ahead and slapped in a new power supply of the box i've been building and put in a new hard drive... installed freebsd then mounted sun raid pack where my backups are located.. no worries.. just more annoying than anything.. i went ahead and mounted the old drive and copied some of the updated stuff..

the last backup was on the 5th so i dont think much has changed since then because i've been really slacking lately... been busy as shit at work and all.. so hopefully everything will be up and running again soon.. i'm thinking i'll take the one w/ the bad blocks and run some util to mark those sectors as bad. then use the drive for the new pc i'm building since i took the drive i was going to use out of it.. it's just more annoying than anything.. i had finally just gotten everything the way i like it and was running beautifully.. this always seems to happen to me though i get the server where i can leave it sit and just do trivial updating then *poof* something bad happens...

i dont know i think i just have really bad luck these days.. but it could always be worse i've seen failing power supplies take out a variety of hardware.. but thanks.. and if nothing else elnore gave some good instructions for people later on... thanks for your help guys and i hope to have everything up and running again here soon... *i hope...*

i also think i need to pick up a duplicate drive and start utalizing the raid-1 in vinum..