Re: [SLUG] recover NTFS

From: Eben King (eben1@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sun Feb 19 2006 - 17:53:02 EST


On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Jason Boxman wrote:

> On Sunday 19 February 2006 16:21, Eben King wrote:
>> Took over two days,
>> because every time there was an error, it stopped and waited (for what?
>> The error to fix itself?) for 5.5 minutes (I timed it). Boo Linux.
>
> What error?

It didn't say.

>> I tried running two tar processes at the same time, reasoning that it was
>> using well under half the bandwidth (maybe 950 K/s), therefore the USB
>> controller wasn't the bottleneck. Whenever there was an error, _both_
>> processes would stop and wait. Even when there wasn't, the rate was about
>> 1/3 of what one would do, so it was faster to run them serially. Boo Linux
>> #2.
>
> Eh? I thought you were talking to a drive that's suffering from a physical
> failure?

No, filesystem corruption.

> How fast would you like damaged media to be?

Oh, 950 K/s is fine under those circumstances. A 5.5 minute wait seems
excessive, though. Having an unoptimized NTFS driver isn't really Linux's
fault; AIUI, MS won't release the specs for NTFS so Linux's driver is
reverse-engineered.

>> Now I've got everything I can get, and it's time to put it back. NTFS
>> writing is unreliable and new, so I chose FAT (vfat). Had to make 3
>> primary + virtual partitions, as XP's formatter won't make a 128 GiB FAT
>> partition (W98's will, but I can't get the drive to show up in W98).
>
> Onto the damaged disk?

The data's on a new, mostly empty HD I happened to have. Lucky him. It's
going back whence it came, since his HD is *physically* OK.

>> Copying to vfat is VERY slow -- in 6.5 hours it's written 11.3 GiB, which
>> is about 500 KiB/s. That's from an uncompressed tar file. It's slower on
>> big files, pausing for many seconds in the write.
>
> What's the output from `dmesg`? The console?

None. That's apparently the normal state of affairs.

>> What can I do to speed this up? I have half a mind to create a big file,
>> format it ext[23], loopback mount it, extract the tar files to it, export
>> it via Samba, mount it from an XP laptop over wifi, and restore it THAT
>> way. I'm afraid that's more trouble than it's worth.
> <snip>
>
> Write the data back to a disk that isn't failing?

The disk is fine; it was the filesystem that was corrupt.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

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