# Bad Superblocks on reiserfs system

## Hal Pacino

First of all I would not recomend a Maxtor harddrive to anyone. This is the second one I've had flake out on me.

Anyway. I'm writing from my spare HD with BeOS on it. I have a 200g Maxtor HD with an 8M cache and I got some bad superblock notices on it. To give you the full rundown on what the errors are, I'll have to reconnect that harddrive and reboot it (I removed it from the computer when it started acting fishy).

What I remember is the following:

-has smartctl (I don't know if that helps)

-reiserfs (not reiser 4, though... I think it's version 3.6)

-LVM2 (I wanted to try it out)

Anyway, is there a way of getting retreiving my data. I transferred my whole CD collection onto it and subsequently threw out all but about three CDs. I have 20G music, writing, work etc on there.

There must be a way to get my data back right?

I'll try to post more info as I try different solutions.

Thanks in advance for any help... and sorry in advance for any newbie-ness.

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## Headrush

The superblock errors are coming from the filesystem, not the hard drive itself.

There may not be anything wrong with the disk.

I think you need to start off a LiveCD and use reiserfsck

```
Usage: reiserfsck [mode] [options]  device

Modes:

  --check                       consistency checking (default)

  --fix-fixable                 fix corruptions which can be fixed without

                                --rebuild-tree

  --rebuild-sb                  super block checking and rebuilding if needed

                                (may require --rebuild-tree afterwards)

  --rebuild-tree                force fsck to rebuild filesystem from scratch

                                (takes a long time)

  --clean-attributes            clean garbage in reserved fields in StatDatas

Options:

  -j | --journal device         specify journal if relocated

  -B | --badblocks file         file with list of all bad blocks on the fs

  -l | --logfile file           make fsck to complain to specifed file

  -n | --nolog                  make fsck to not complain

  -z | --adjust-size            fix file sizes to real size

  -q | --quiet                  no speed info

  -y | --yes                    no confirmations

  -V                            prints version and exits

  -a and -p                     some light-weight auto checks for bootup

  -f and -r                     ignored

Expert options:

  --no-journal-available        do not open nor replay journal

  -S | --scan-whole-partition   build tree of all blocks of the device

```

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## Hal Pacino

Thanks for letting me know. I'm just curious. My first Maxtor HD failed with an ext3 fs and this one is reiserfs. What is my making my fs's fail?

And does rebuild-tree destroy the data on the HD?

Thanks again.

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## djpenguin

The appearance of bad blocks is almost always a sign the drive is going bad.

I've never had good luck with Maxtor drives, IME they fail about as often as WD drives (a lot)

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## Hal Pacino

Almost always or always? (I think I'll buy a Seagate next time.)

Is there e a way to know for certin that my HD will fail?

Is it too risky to turn it on and root around a bit if I don't have a spare HD with which to immediately try a backup?

Thanks for your input guys.

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## djpenguin

If it were my hard drive, I wouldn't fire it up again until I was ready to do an immediate backup.

Almost always means exactly what it sounds like.  There are rare exceptions, but usually, it means the drive is on it's way out, so it's time to salvage the data and RMA the sucker.

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## doggizback

had the same trouble. Maxtor 160GB IDE

im absolutely the worst person in the world at getting gentoo loaded on a system...i finally got it on there, after about 2 months of cracking my head over it...

only to have the drive one day decide its fried. had it maybe 3 months, after taking 2 months to get the system on there. 

i never took it back. buddy of mine at work (software company, if you can believe it from an idiot such as myself) who actually knows his stuff...same problem with a Maxtor SATA drive. 

great job Maxtor..though it might not make a dent in your sales, we tell everyone we know to avoid you. 

have a cheap lil samsung SATA drive that just loves life, came in an ugly box, and gives me no trouble (knock on wood). 

NONETHELESS...to hopefully add something helpful, although i doubt it...try seeing if you can mount the drive with a knoppix CD? FTP all the junk you want over to a stable machine, and prey to the borg it finishes in time.

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## Headrush

 *djpenguin wrote:*   

> The appearance of bad blocks is almost always a sign the drive is going bad.
> 
> I've never had good luck with Maxtor drives, IME they fail about as often as WD drives (a lot)

 

bad blocks and and bad superblocks are two completely different things.

A bad block is not necessarily a sign a drive is going bad (Although taking precautions and backing up is smart). All hard drives have or will develop bad sectors and support is built into the hardware to map these sectors from use. Obviously an abundance of errors would indicate a more serious problem.

I wouldn't put too much stock in people's opinion on which brand is best. For every hundred people that would swear by Seagate, you'll find another hundred that swear by Maxtor, or Western Digital. It's a crap shoot about how long your's last. 

In the last 3 weeks I have had 3 customers that have had major hard drive failures and lost important data. 

(People need to learn to start backing up data). Considering the gap between a hard drive platter and the read-write head, it's amazing they last as long as the do!

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## Kenji Miyamoto

 *djpenguin wrote:*   

> The appearance of bad blocks is almost always a sign the drive is going bad.
> 
> I've never had good luck with Maxtor drives, IME they fail about as often as WD drives (a lot)

 I haven't had any trouble with my WD 60GB hard drive and ReiserFS.

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## c4

I put away a computer in a closet once just to get it out of my way. Everything worked ok for the first few days, but as the air in the closet started to warm up, the harddrives started failing and eventually I kept getting hardlocks and random system crashes.

So I got some better cooling, placed a couple of fans for additional air for the harddrives and than two more for the chassi (big chieftec full tower with several drives) and had the fans rotating as slow as possible (reduced airflow but also reduced noise). Sofar the box has been running fine and currently has a 230+ day uptime.

My point here is that getting failures on the filesystem may not always be that the drives are breaking down, but in fact can be caused from other issues, specifically heat problems. You might want to get an extra fan for the harddrive or be other means try to keep the box cooler (like an extra chassi fan).

If your drives have smart-sensors, instaling hddtemp can give you your current temperatures. My harddrives are running at ~30-32 oC right now. Also, I'm running seagates. Even have one old 28.8 gig from 1999 running without a glitch  :Wink: 

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## Hal Pacino

tried to mount using

```
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdc3 /mnt/back3
```

and i got the following:

```
hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

hdc: dma_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=136694, high=0, low=1386694, sector 262144

hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

hdc: dma_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=136694, high=0, low=1386694, sector 262144

hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

hdc: dma_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=136694, high=0, low=1386694, sector 262144

hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

hdc: dma_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=136694, high=0, low=1386694, sector 262144

end_request: I/O error, dev 16:03 (hdc), sector 262144

ide1(22,3): sh-2029: resierfs read_bitmaps: bitmap block (#32768) reading failed

ide1(22,3): sh-2014: reiserfs_read_super unable to read bitmap

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc3, or too many mounted filesystems
```

then i tried 

```
reiserfsck ----rebuild-sb /dev/hdc3
```

to which i received:

```
hdc: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }

hdc: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError },  LBAsect=1140230, high=0, low=1190230, sector 65680

end_request:  I/O error, dev 16:03 (hdc), sector 65680
```

*note: because I was hurried in copying down such info there may be a typo above. I think the "LBAsect" and "low" should match, but they don't so I may have copied one of them wrong.

Also my hd is running pretty hot to the touch at the very least. I opened my case and that sucker was like a little stove even though it had only been on for a few minutes. My older Quantum HD is always on (it's the one I'm using to write this) and it's much cooler to the touch. Subjective, I know, but maybe it counts for something.

Any more thoughts, suggestions?

Thanks again everyone.

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## c4

 *Hal Pacino wrote:*   

> Also my hd is running pretty hot to the touch at the very least. I opened my case and that sucker was like a little stove even though it had only been on for a few minutes. My older Quantum HD is always on (it's the one I'm using to write this) and it's much cooler to the touch. Subjective, I know, but maybe it counts for something.

 

Here's an idea: unplug the faulty drive and let it cool down, say half an hour or something. You'll want to have it cooled down to room temperature. Then the next time you connect your drive, make sure to have lots of air cooling it. 

For example, keep your case open and have the drive connected but leave it placed outside the case on the floor, on a chair etc. All to get as much air to it as possible . Then use any kind of fan you have available for keeping it cooled down. Chassi fans work ok, or why not use a large room-fan (you know like a 30-40 cm size one). I have saved lots of data this way while mounting the drive and than grabbing eveything from it. When reading/writing to/from the harddrive it's temperature rises dramatically so the idea is to keep it as cool as possible. If a baring is worn down it will cause the temperature to increase more rapidly and cause drive errors.. so the steps involved in cooling, mounting and grabbing data may need to be repeated untill you've got everything backed up.

If successful and you could get all your files back, you should probably consider the drive to be faulty. You could use it for temporary things, but IMHO don't keep important work on it anymore.

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## Hal Pacino

Assuming I get these errors again, is there any way to force my HD to read its data? Is there anyway to recover data of sucha a HD? Is letting it cool and hoping it works next time the only way?

Thanks for all your help.

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## c4

Well, my thought was that the harddrive was failing with reading errors because of overheating. But if something is broken there's not much to do about it but hand it over to experts for data extraction in a lab. 

Once it starts getting read/write errors I belive the system tries to remount the drive in readonly mode to prevent your data getting corrupted. But if this also failes you'll start seing things like { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } in your logs. So as long as the drive is read-only you should still be able to access your files.

The cooling trick I descibed above is the only one I know of when 'forcing' a malfunctioning disc to start working again, at least temporarly. If others know of any ways I'd also be interested in learning a few tricks myself.

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## Hal Pacino

Anyone else have any thoughts on how to recover the data other than cooling and hoping?

Thanks.

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## Hal Pacino

for real... no more suggestions?

thanks.

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