[NCLUG] XFS, "Can't read superblock"

Bob Proulx bob at proulx.com
Wed Dec 6 21:58:31 MST 2006


Chad Perrin wrote:
> It's now in the middle of a ddrescue that has been running since
> yesterday morning.  There are, apparently, many many errors on this
> drive.  I'd like to know how the heck it got to this state without dear
> ol' dad noticing.

When drives start to die they often die very quickly.

I once had a drive just barely start to give indications of problems.
It had been completely fine and then Sue complained of a failure for
the first time on the drive.  I was able to scan the disk for bad
sectors and lock off those blocks so that they would no longer be
used, leaving only good sectors still in active use.  That worked
around the failuresfor the moment.  I immediately handed a stack of
floppy disks to Sue and said, "Get everything that you care about off
of the machine right now", which she did.  The next morning the
machine booted and ran for a few minutes but then really started to
get disk errors.  After an hour it was completely unusable and
unrecoverable.  It went from being seemingly fine to a little flakey
to really, really bad over the course of just a few hours of runtime.

Bob



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