HELP my fileserver crashed!

[Doug G]

I use lots of Western Digital drives, I've had to replace a couple over the years, most recently I just needed to fill out a web form, print the resulting RMA packing list and get a replacement a couple days later. No questions or quizzes, I don't recall ever having to use WD diagnostics to RMA a drive.

If it were me with your problem, I'd boot a live CD and see if the data is accessible without booting off the drive. Oh, and the more you run stuff like badblocks the more likely you'll have data loss. If there are bad sectors and the drive is failing, as it appears, get whatever is recoverable off as soon as possible, before trying to fix/diagnose the bad drive.

There are data recovery services that can recover your data off a completely inoperable drive, but they are pretty expensive.

Good luck!

[Chilly Willy]

Well like I said "MOST" - as a sys admin, I have to deal with many brands & can't recall which ones exactly - WD could be an exception. This is why I suggested contacting WD & doing what they say. & yes, I agree that you need to get as much data off that HD as you can, ASAP. (I took that as a GIVEN, maybe I shouldn't)

[Panzerknacker]

Ok I just tried to recover what's left of the data but that aint much lol. The Ext4 partition of the OS is completely unaccesible, and the raid1 partition I removed from the array ASAP in case it would corrupt it's mirror on the other drive, got all the data from the array copied to my laptop just to be sure.

Tomorrow I'll contact WD.

[Panzerknacker]

Alright finally got the new harddrive from WD, setting up everything again!