Attached USB drive died - any hope?

[RocketJSquirrel]

I have very vanilla Seagate "Desktop" 2TB USB drive formatted as ext3 connected to my N66U. The past couple of days, it's been making beeping noises and what sounds like disk seeking noises. Today, it seems to have finally died.

When I run fsck.ext3 on it, no matter what parameters I use, I get the error message

fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

Is there any hope? Any other commands to try besides fsck? Or another way to get this drive working again? I have already tried swapping USB cables.

I am running 3.0.0.4.374.33_0-sdk5 firmware.

 

[L&LD]

Try on a desktop computer (able to read EXT3) connected as SATA not USB.

 

[jlake]

Beeping noises aren't good.

I'm trying to recover a ReiserFS drive of my neighbors who also had beeping noises. I have had success in the past using the software below on ReiserFS but today it's not looking good (for him). I have never used it on ext3. so have no idea if it would work for you.

http://www.cnwrecovery.com/html/unix_recovery.html

 

[Mrid]

I believe Merlin (maybe?) commented that these routers have trouble fsck'ing large hard disks due to their inherent memory limitations.

I tend to just run gparted through a virtualized Ubuntu session when the syslog reports disk issues. Just unmount and "check." There are also a few different "live" linux distros that can perform the same function.

 

[sinshiva]

Beeping noises aren't good.

I'm trying to recover a ReiserFS drive of my neighbors who also had beeping noises. I have had success in the past using the software below on ReiserFS but today it's not looking good (for him). I have never used it on ext3. so have no idea if it would work for you.

http://www.cnwrecovery.com/html/unix_recovery.html

nifty, don't hear of many people using reiserfs anymore. i liked using that as my root filesystem along with xfs for media storage once upon a time. good luck with that

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

I believe Merlin (maybe?) commented that these routers have trouble fsck'ing large hard disks due to their inherent memory limitations.

This is true, but I have a flash drive plugged into the router as swap space just for this purpose.

GPARTED Live seems to want to scan forever. I am finding some utilities on the web and am currently trying DiskInternals Linux Recovery.

The interesting thing about the DiskInternals program is that it sees the partitions on the ext3 drive, but I'm not sure what the right path is from there. When I tell it to "recover" a partition, it seems to start finding deleted files to undelete, which is not what I want to do.

I guess with a 2TB drive, I need patience and just let things run for a while and see what happens.

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

The tale has a happy ending. System Rescue CD's fsck repaired the drive. It powered through a lot of disk errors the other tools like GPARTED couldn't handle. I guess it has a newer and more powerful version of fsck.

Now to go out and get a real NAS to replace this drive before it dies its final death.

 

[jlake]

Cool. Glad you got it fixed. It took me 3 days with the cnw recovery software that I linked to get that reiserfs drive recovered, but it had a happy ending too.