Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 12:59:55 -0500 From: lmayhew@freespace.net To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Hard drive wierdness Message-ID: <200103061759.MAA02918@eagle.freespace.net>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I'm hoping someone can give us some help on an unusual problem. Our main server has been running freebsd 3.4 stable for about a year without incident. The problem may have started a few days before Christmas, in that we had a problem with our server which resulted in it crashing every time I tried to read my mail. We ended up deleting my inbox, and this appeared to solve the problem. We assumed that I had something corrupt in my mailbox that was causing the problem. A week later, we started getting seekdone errors, which seemed to indicate a hard drive failure. We swapped over to a backup drive, were able to retrieve the files from the bad drive with a little work, and replaced the backup drive with a new drive. About a week later, we once again got the seekdone errors, so we got a completely new set of hard drives. We did a new build of freebsd3.4 on each drive, then copied over mail, websites, and other relevant files. Five days later, once again we got seekdone errors which seemed to indicate a hard drive failure. Thinking that maybe we had some hardware problem somewhere on the server, we built a whole new machine from scratch. Completely new machine, and the old machine was taken off line until we could figure out what was causing the problem. So what happened yesterday? You guessed it -- hard drive failure in the middle of a mail backup. After running for 3 weeks straight without a problem on the new machine, we had yet another hard drive failure, with the same seekdone errors showing up. I swapped the backup drive in and booted from that, but when we try to retrieve anything off the original drive, we get a "magic Number" error, and we are told that every superblock on the drive is bad. We can't mount the drive to retrieve the last of the info from it. Incidently, our secondary DNS server has also been running the same version of Freebsd without issue for the last year. (Watch it develop hard drive failures now just because I have said that) The other servers in the office running NT and one running an older version of freebsd also don't seem to be affected. We ran a utility on one of the supposed "failed" drives, and it shows no faults in the drive. So, if you're still reading at this point, my questions are: Does anyone have a clue what could be causing this? My sanity won't take much more... Anyone have any idea how we can retrieve the last of the information off this current drive? With every superblock supposedly bad we haven't been able to mount the file system to retrieve the info. Any thoughts or suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks, Linda To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200103061759.MAA02918>