LVM1 Bad harddisk. How do I het data off the Volume?

Hi.

One of my harddisks in my 2 harddisk LVM 1 setup, The bad harddisk is a 120 GB Maxtor harddisk, who now identifies itself to the system as:
hde: Oaztor"6[120R0" " " " " " " " " " " " ", ATA DISK drive
The bios reports that the size of the harddisk is 80GB!

And of curse, I can't access any LVM volumes!

debian:~# pvscan -v
pvscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
pvscan -- walking through all physical volumes found
pvscan -- inactive PV "/dev/hdf1"  is associated to unknown VG "vg" (run vgscan)
pvscan -- total: 1 [76.34 GB] / in use: 1 [76.34 GB] / in no VG: 0 [0]

debian:~# vgscan -v
vgscan -- removing "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d"
vgscan -- creating empty "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d"
vgscan -- reading all physical volumes (this may take a while...)
vgscan -- scanning for all active volume group(s) first
vgscan -- reading data of volume group "vg" from physical volume(s)
vgscan -- ERROR "vg_read_with_pv_and_lv(): current PV" can't get data of volume group "vg" from physical volume(s)
vgscan -- "/etc/lvmtab" and "/etc/lvmtab.d" successfully created
vgscan -- WARNING: This program does not do a VGDA backup of your volume group

As I understand, I have to run vgcfgrestore to get access to the volume. But what about the faulty hde, is it also possebill to get data off this disk?

debian:~# fdisk -l /dev/hde

Disk /dev/hde: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16383 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1         33289    271505 120060832+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/hde2         33289     66578  16777472    0  Empty
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(2, 2, 0) should be (2, 15, 63)
/dev/hde3         33289     66578  16777472    0  Empty
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(2, 2, 0) should be (2, 15, 63)
/dev/hde4         33289     66578  16777472    0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(2, 2, 0) should be (2, 15, 63)

How can I rescue as mutch data as possebill?
I do not have access to a spare harddisk to do a dd_rescue on.

I'm useinf debian woody, and LVM 1.
Please advice. I'm afraid i'll do more damage, than rescue! Thanks.

Sincerley
Heine Laursen

Heine Laursen wrote:

Is there no one who had similar experincence?
It's not like I'm going to hunt you down, if somthing goes wrong :-) I would really apriceate any sugestion's. Granted that any is given,

else I have to hunt you down :-)

Sincerley
Heine Laursen

Hi Heine,
search the list archive, this topic comes up all the time. I haven't had the trouble myself, but I've seen references to dd_rescue.

~David

Restore from your backups ?

patrick

Did you check the ATA/ide cable? Did you try to replace that cable or to verify if the drive has one or more ide pins bent or shorted?

I don't have any backup!

--
Sincerley
Heine Laursen

Yes, I have tryed with 2 differnt controlers (onboard, and promse controler) and 2 different ide cables. There are no pins who are bent.

Sincerley
Heine Laursen

Hello Heine,

It sounds like you're in a bad spot. I've been having issues with Maxtor drives as of late myself. In the past 2 months, I've had 4 die and 2 WD. Be prepared. I haven't worked with LVM1, but you're probably sounds independant of the LVM version at this point.

This bad spot... It's because the BIOS won't recognize the drive. The only way to get anything off the disk is to get it recognized by the computer, only then can you do some magical recovery stuff, like dd_rescue.

Since you've already tried multiple controllers, the only thing I can suggest is to try a different computer. The key is going to be fiddling with the BIOS, only once you get the BIOS to recognize the drive, will you be able to proceed. Pull everything out of of the computer that isn't needed for running, that includes extra HD's, controller cards, sounds cards, everything. Try the Auto-Detect in the BIOS, if that doesn't work, try giving it the exact CHS parameters, try different computers (some BIOS will detect it). Try the PowerMax util from Maxtor, even if you can't get BIOS to quite recognize the drive, just a quick test as you don't want to strain the drive much more.

If you can get it to POST with the correct drive, use the dd_rescue util and another drive. This will copy the old drive to a new one, at a sector by sector level. It'll take a *very* long time, but you might be able to get some data off the drive. But prepared for the worst and you'll be excited if you get anything off.

As I said, I've had this happen quite a lot lately, with these crappy Maxtor drives and their 1 year warranty. DD_rescue took 5 days on a 200 GB drive and was able to get 80% of the data off of the drive, enough that I could bring up the VG in paritial mode and get a lot of the data off, but alas a lot was lost too.

http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

This is what worked for me:

http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/EXT3-filesystem-recovery-in-LVM2.html

Maybe the Maxtor's "Powermax" can get your disk to remember its correct specs. See

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/maxtor/menuitem.3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=22&displayEULA=true

Annoyingly, you need a Windows box to create this utility disk.

Good luck