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Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 7:24 pm Post subject: Help!! Ubuntu server issues

Hey guys,

I have a box at home that's a dedicated file server. Awhile back I set it up running Ubuntu (and I've kept it updated since).

Over time I've added new hard drives for various things. One of those times was to store my music collection (all ripped from CDs I own, mind you).

In fact, what I did at the time was I dropped a spare 120GB drive in there, formatted the whole thing (ext3 if memory serves) as one big partition, and did everything I had to as to share it with my network.

Today I went to the share (from my windows machine), and there's nothing there. Needless to say, I panicked, especially considering that it's the culmination of MANY MANY hours of ripping my cd collection (about 500 CDs).

Looking at the server, if I open a terminal and do LS in that folder, there's nothing there.

If I run GPARTED on that drive, it says it's "unallocated"...

Now, especially considering this is Linux (which I admit I'm not as familiar as I am with Windows), what can I do to have the best chance of restoring those files? I estimate it's probably 40GB worth on the whole drive.

Ideas?

Thanks!

editI just looked at the screen again, and when I opened up GPARTED (from a terminal, so I could select the drive), it's reporting "unable to open /dev/sdb unrecognised disk label".

Note: I tried GPARTED on /dev/sda and /dev/sdc and I confirmed both work.

Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 10:53 pm Post subject:

Offhand I'd say you have a high probability of a hardware failure.

Did you try fsck yet? What did it tell you?

Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 2:29 am Post subject:

Very strange - this morning I decided to take a page from my Windows playbook - I figured I'd do a reboot.

So I rebooted the machine. Now when I go into it, I can see the drive and all the data again...

P.S. I didn't run fsck yet because it scared me off a little with the warnings about "running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage", and I didn't want to chance breaking it again.

One thing's for sure - while I'm pretty sure I have 90% of that drive backed up to DVD-R, I think this weekend I'll make absolutely sure I have 100% of it backed up. Whew!

Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 4:24 am Post subject:

you can always run fsck -N to simulate without acting on it.

Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 4:39 am Post subject:

You can also force a fsck on reboot (as if the system had crashed or otherwise shutdown uncleanly) by doing a:

shutdown -F -r now