Ubuntu – How to repair a disk on Ubuntu when fsck fails

ext3hard driveUbuntu

I was able to start a broken raid 1 system with one available and one broken disk by issuing the following command.

mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md9 /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2

I was able to copy the VMWare image from the disk and repair it with the VMWare command 

vmkfstools -x repair /path/to/image.vmdk

in order to mount it on a ESXi. The image was converted from GSX to ESXi format after the repair.

I was able to mount the disk (the /dev/sdb1 partition) in a fresh Ubuntu installation but while trying to rescue /var/www and issuing ls -al I get the following output.

brokern file system

The command fsck -y /dev/sdb1 did not report any failures.

The command fdisk -l /dev/sdb reports the following.

enter image description here

What can I do to get the data from /var/www?

UPDATE 1:

Running e2fsck -f -y /dev/sdb1 started to repair a lot of failures. I however doubt that this will get me my data back.

UPDATE 2:

After running e2fsck -f -y /dev/sdb1 there is absolutely no data in /var/www and lots of files with generated numeric file names are now in lost+found folder.

Are there any options out of this horrible accident?

Best Answer

First off, you messed up by forcing the RAID to assemble. It's likely that one of the disks had a much older version of the data than the other. By forcing it, you told md that both disks contain the same data and to assume they are clean. So md is free to pull any sector off either drive.

The first thing you should have done was take a complete copy of the drives using a tool like dd. Then all of your recovery efforts should have been targeted to that file and not the drives.

It's possible you are too late for that.

Now you have two options.

The first is to send the drives off to a commercial data recovery company such as Kroll OnTrack. This can be expensive. I've had bills from them for anywhere from $250 to $5000. But if your data is worth it, then it's worth it.

If at this point you don't care about any further data loss, then your second option is to attempt recovery yourself using dd. Power down the drives and disconnect the one that was reported as failed earlier. Then boot the server from a rescue CD and use dd to copy the drive to another drive. Be aware that any work you might do on the original drives at this point will only make it harder for a commercial data recovery company to help you out when you decide you're in over your head later.

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