How can I change fsck behaviour when restarting Snap 1100?
 

:uhh:I have a very nice Snap 1100 with SnapOS 4.0.854, or so I thought until it started playing up and running really slow. After a bit of investigation I find a bad spot on the disk, and no amount of fscking around will get past it.

So - I have a disk with a basically good file system, and well down the disk, beyond almost all my data, there's a bad spot. Every restart finds the spot, takes the disk offline and flags it for a thorough check next time, so I can't get at my data in the good area.

How can I modify the behaviour of fsck so that it does the (usual) short check at restart that doesn't find the bad spot? If I can do this I can get all my data off without having resort to restoring from back-up media (an operation that could take days)

Help, please!

Re: How to change fsck behaviour when restarting Snap 1100
 

What brand of disk drive is it?

If you took the drive out, attached it to a PC and ran Seatools/DFT/Maxblast/etc (if it is a Seagate/Hitachi/Maxtor/etc) it could remap the faulty sector and replace it with one of the spares.

Then you would have a good sector with bad data - would SnapOS handle this?

Re: How to change fsck behaviour when restarting Snap 1100
 

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't know how SnapOS will react to it. I'd guess that it depends on what is supposed to be there. There's also the possibility that I'll mess up the swap and lose the lot. I'd rather try something a little softer first. If I can get a better solution to the data recovery bit, I might try your idea as a way to wring some extra service out of the drive. Otherwise, I' ll use your idea as a last resort.

Re: How can I change fsck behaviour when restarting Snap 1100?
 

Make a copy of the boot tracks while it still working so you have a recovery mode, instruction in the wiki section. HD to Image File.

I know spinrite will remap a drive without loosing any data. It works at the controler level and does not inturpet data. The last one I had like that failed pretty quick. MFG Diag tools do not over write anything with out warning you first. Most just read the smart data.

Create you self a image file for recovery, 1st before you do any thing else.