Crashed HD - Recovering from it !!!

[josel]

IDE HD crashed and now I can't boot it up. Customer tells me the last the saw was a message "overflow something" scrolling on screen and computer simply froze.

They turned computer off and that was the end of it!

What should I do to attempt saving some data from HD if at all possible?

I have other computers I can boot with same unix version. I am thinking mounting HD as secondary IDE, but then again, how do you do that?

Thank you all in adavance!

Jose Lerebours

 

[edfair]

Do they have an emergency boot set? If so , you could clean the file system if the drive spins up, then mount the drive and remove enough junk to allow boot.
If the drive doesn't spin up then attempting to put it in another machine will be useless.
In any case, what you are facing isn't pretty.
And the million dollar question, "Are they backed up?" Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[josel]

Hello Ed,

Thank you for the prompt response. Well, I'm afraid that "not pretty" is right

Box is coming in from CA and I did advised them to set it up with its own backup but their techie suggested to run the backup from within their WIN NT - Not only he never got to it, but he advised that adding a backup for UNIX box alone was not necessary ...

As per emergency disks, I remember sending that when I shipped the box to them but I did not keep a copy of my own. When I got off the phone with them all they had found was OS media and it was not on site !*&#%$@

I will keep you posted on final outcome ... Once again, thank you for your post!

Jose Lerebours

 

[Nostradamus]

just a comment...

GOOD LUCK !
/Sören

 

[Megabitman]

A couple of thoughts:

1). It is possible to mount the IDE as a secondary drive; review the man pages for mkdev hd. When you run through divvy, merely name the file system that has your data, DO NOT CREATE IT!!!. If possible, image the hard drive prior to doing this so if you blow off the partition, you can get back to this same spot (I've used Drive Copy by Power Quest to make images of UNIX drives just for that reason!!). Then, mount the filesystem via the mount command e.g. mount /dev/usr1 /mnt and you can access your data to move to another box following the path down from /mnt (assuming you named the filesystem /usr1 during the divvy process). I know this works because I just did this last week (I have a client who hadn't backed up since May because their tape drive wasn't working; needless to say it made it interesting!!)

2). I have been able to make Boot and Root disks from other SCO boxes before and recovered the filesystem. If you have any additional boxes, give it a shot. Again, make a dup of the drive before you do that.

Let me know if any of that helps.

 

[josel]

Thank you all for responding ... I saddly lost that customer to a combination of "lack of cooperation from their WIN Admin and the UNIX box crashing as it dit"

It happens!

I must let our community know that all your suggestions (even wishing me `GOOD LUCK`) were good and I feel as though we had a shot at getting that baby back to the front line after loosing only a few hour sleep Unfurtunally, we often find ourselves in a fighting ready outfit and held back by external factors one wishes did not exist.

Once again, thank you all for responding;

Jose Lerebours