Happy Thanksgiving

Happy thanksgiving to my Canadian friends :)

Back from the Dead – Fixing Drives in Linux

So as you all know I lost my NAS due to some disk errors. 

Sadly, it was actually my flash adapter card (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.711) failed and this caused my FreeNAS to fail.

After much debugging – since this solid state drive seemed like a power supply failing: power turns off a couple seconds after being turned on, turning it on sometimes would do nothing until you unplugged the power supply then plug it back in.  (http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Tell-When-Computer-Power-Supply-Is-Failing)

Anyway, after figuring it out, I put in an old unlocked X Box hard disk (15 Gb) and that’s now my boot drive.  I used the newest version of FreeNAS which allows for a “full install” on a hard disk. (simply boot it up, and use the console menu to install)

Now that I’ve got my FreeNAS server up again, I still have a broken 500Gb drive to fix.

I took the 500Gb drive out and put it in my Ubuntu Linux lab server.  I usually use this machine for any experiments that I’m doing and for virtual machines.

Canada computers and a few others have some pretty good deals on 1Tb drives right now.   (I got mine for $90.00. http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=024109&cid=HDD.443.877)  So this is a good time to upgrade my drive.

I put it into my lab server, and dd’ed the drive to make a complete copy onto my new 1Tb drive. 

Now I have a whole bitwise copy of my drive, now the fun part.

I don’t know UFS as well as I know FAT or EXT, so I was hoping to find a utility to help me with the restoration of this drive.

A quick google found me a utility called “testdisk”, (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) and since I have a bitwise copy of my drive, I thought let’s give it a try.

Ran it,  it took literally 1 hour to analyze the drive.  It was so slow that I almost gave up.  However, beer and a night of Simpsons let me relax and let it do its work.

I wish I’d taken screen shots for you, but I was thrilled to find out that it actually worked. 

It recognized the UFS filesystem, GFI partition and all.  It rewrote the partition table, and dropped me to a command prompt.

I installed “ufsutils” with apt-get install, and ran fsck.ufs on it.  fsck did it usual “i found xxx fix?” and the drive was repaired.

I copied the data from the old 500Gb to the new 1Tb, and installed the new 1Tb drive into my FreeNAS server, added the drive, and ta-da it worked.

Back in business.

Now, the new version of FreeNAS has some neat new features that I discovered, the least of which is “/etc/rc.d/transmission blocklist-update” – which makes my old tutorial redundant, and I’ll write an update about that sometime soon :)

This week I’m going to reconfigure it – and I’ll probably write a little tutorial for you all who are interested.

In the meantime, I got my NAS back – and my movies.