[vox-tech] Seeking: HD box, ethernet cable.

[vox-tech@lists.lugod.org]

Morning,

HD Box:
  I'm looking to borrow a box to ship a standard 3.5" hard drive, need
foam padding box, included.  To ship a IBM drive back for replacement.
If you don't want the return box back afterwards that's okay.

Ethernet cable:
  If anyone has a spool of Ethernet cable and a crimper that they would 
consider loaning out please let me know.  I'd like to do a two day 
wiring project... I doubt I need more than 30 meters of cable but I'll 
compensate for the supplies (cable, tips).

    TTFN,
      Mike


Ob tech thing:
  Those IBM 75GXP drives that start making noises and losing data, are 
interesting.  Back on April 1, I started having bad noises coming out of
one of these, and powered the drive off for a few weeks.  I had one
very large (70 Gig) ext3 filesystem on the drive, and in the end about
16 unreadable blocks... I don't notice any of the important files missing
from the filesystem.

  If anyone needs to recover a filesystem from a bad drive I recommend 
the following steps:

  1 - Get a drive that is bigger than the largest partition 
      on the bad drive.

  Repeat the following for each partition.
  2 - Get "dd_rescue" (1) and give it a few passes at the partition.
      Once you are tired of the bad noises, stop.
  3 - Fsck the resulting file...
  4 - loopback mount the file...
  5 - copy your data out of the loopback mount to some safe place.
  6 - unmount and nuke the file. 

  7 - Wipe drive (with badblocks -svw)
  8 - Contact the vendor of drive, get RMA and box, then ship drive.


  Also IBM provides a "hard drive fitness test" program, which comes in
the form of a bootable floppy disk image, and can be used to test the
drive for problems, reallocate bad sectors, and reformat the drive.
This program appears to work on other makes of drives, not just IBM
and not just IDE.
  The drive test failed with error code 0x70, the reallocate bad sectors
failed with 0x70, but the drive format worked (unfortunately).  So now
I have a 80-ish Gig hard drive that when badblocks runs over it (I did
three -w passes) shows no signs of problems.  I'm not sure if I'm going
to be able to RMA it now... but I'll worry about that after I have shipping 
materials.


1) http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
>    * dd_rescue does not abort on errors on the input file, unless you
>      specify a maximum error number. Then dd_rescue will abort when
>      this number is reached.
>    * dd_rescue does not truncate the output file, unless asked to.
>    * You can tell dd_rescue to start from the end of a file and move
>      backwards.
>    * It uses two block sizes, a large (soft) block size and a small
>      (hard) block size. In case of errors, the size falls back to the
>      small one and is promoted again after a while without errors.