Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> To disable journal recovery mount with -oro,norecovery, ...

Just an update on how things are going.
I've been using -o ro,noatime,nodiratime,norecovery as mount options, and that seems to work well.

Took my disks home (been using a PC I have at work for testing disks and recovering stuff), and oh what fun. I have a couple of old PCs at home ...

One is an old AMD64 with nVidia chipset - which worked fine when I last used it. As soon as the faulty drive hits an error the machine freezes. If I already have another login, I can see that whatever process was reading the disk is now in uninterruptible sleep and anything else that now attempts to do a disk access does the same. Only recovery is hard power off - ouch. So scratch that. And for good measure, I left it powered on with just the good disk attached and booted from it - after a while it comes up with something to do with a watchdog timeout with a CPU locked up, and then freezes.

Dragged out another old PC, what was for it's day a fairly high spec HP workstation which worked fine when I blagged it from work (it was being scrapped). Plugged it in, it powered on ... then off ... then on ... then off. "Oh bother" (or words to that general effect) were uttered.

So I fired up a VM on my laptop. Using firewire* didn't work - the disk just didn't show up, so USB2 it is then. Only one of my caddies supports >2G drives, so I had to use a virtual disk on the laptop, recover files to that, swap disks, copy them off to the new one, swap disks and recover a bit more ... Got a fair bit done over the weekend.
But - I did find that this faulty Seagate drive did seem to work much better in the USB caddy than it did on SATA in the PC at work. And so it's been, it's sat on the workbench and recovering files quite well - just an occasional error, and so far only one lockup today.

So far I've recovered around 1/3 of the recordings - way way more than I ever expected. If it carries on like this, it looks like I'll get most of them back.

Perhaps it is worth trying to find the money for enough disk space for a backup in future :-/



* I'd choose FireWire 800, or even FireWire 400, over USB2 any day for performance.