BLU's server crash and data recovery

[Jerry Feldman]

On September, 1 we experienced what appeared to be a disk failure.
We have a Dell Poweredge 1750 with hardware RAID and 3 Ultra SCSI 320GB=20
drives that JABR set up as Raid 5. I also have in my possession 2 Dell=20
Poweredge 1750s, and I can confirm on these systems that the drives are=20
problematical. Currently the 1750 is reporting 2 failed units and 1 good =

unit. I also think that oe of the drives may have been unused. I also=20
confirm that all 3 drives successfully spin up in both of the Dells and=20
i an Intel whitebox system.

One thing I am going to try to do is to dd each of the drives as soon as =

I can acquire some space (possibly on a USB SATA). When my home 40GB=20
drive died while installing a new system at home, I did some research on =

data recovery companies and the cost usually runs at or above $1000 per=20
drive. This would place the BLU in debt :-)

I'm going to try to see if I can do a 'dd if=3D/dev/sdx of=3D/dev/NULL' t=
o=20
see if the drives are readable. When I placed those drives into the=20
Intel system, when Centos started up, the initial vgscan reported some=20
I/O errors on one of the 3 drives, but on subsequent boots no errors=20
were reported.

We would like to be able to recover the data as we had the listserv=20
archives. Note, our backup stopped working about a year ago when we=20
added some security features, so we do have some of the archives. We=20
also lost some of the meeting videos.

I'd like to know what options I have short of trying to pay a data=20
recovery company.

--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846