August 2, 201411 yr I know. What I'm trying to do is get the missing drive running to a point where it won't say "unformatted" any more so I can rebuild it as a whole (with the almost dead drive). I'm hoping it could have enough left in it to do this just so I can get a parity sync done and then replace the drive. So, that's why I'm asking about what to do when a drive is showing "unformatted" after --rebuild-tree failed to run because there are damaged blocks. From what I've read it seems like Spinrite might be my only chance / solution but I have no idea how to use that program to try and fix (I don't know if fix is the right word) those damaged blocks. Ok - I think you may just be saying it wrong. You are trying to repair your bad secter so that you can re-run reiserfsck and access the data off of the drive. That is not a rebuild. A rebuild it when you use parity and the other disks to reconstruct a bad disk. Read about a tool called badblocks. That's exactly right... repair! Okay, I've read up about badblocks... but I can't seem to find anywhere any information on where to place the file to install it on my flash drive in order to run the program? I downloaded it and have the "badblocks-1.42" file but that's about as far as I can seem to get. All of the threads seem to indicate a pre-understainding of the usage I'm sorry I'm so useless without instruction. All of the info refers to the program for Linux and unfortunately... I just don't know how to use linux (the only linux I use is Un-Raid) and the only reason I know how to use that is because of this forum. I know that's not such a good thing but I'm not a power user and until now it's been fine for my purposes. I just don't know how to go from here. Did you try going to a command prompt and typing "badblocks" and pressing enter? I did this on 6.0 beta 6 and found it is already a part of the standard distro. Not sure what version you are using but my guess is there is no need to download or install - just read about the parameters and figure out what command you want to enter. If in doubt, post your proposed command and you can get some feedback before you run it.
August 4, 201411 yr Author I know. What I'm trying to do is get the missing drive running to a point where it won't say "unformatted" any more so I can rebuild it as a whole (with the almost dead drive). I'm hoping it could have enough left in it to do this just so I can get a parity sync done and then replace the drive. So, that's why I'm asking about what to do when a drive is showing "unformatted" after --rebuild-tree failed to run because there are damaged blocks. From what I've read it seems like Spinrite might be my only chance / solution but I have no idea how to use that program to try and fix (I don't know if fix is the right word) those damaged blocks. Ok - I think you may just be saying it wrong. You are trying to repair your bad secter so that you can re-run reiserfsck and access the data off of the drive. That is not a rebuild. A rebuild it when you use parity and the other disks to reconstruct a bad disk. Read about a tool called badblocks. That's exactly right... repair! Okay, I've read up about badblocks... but I can't seem to find anywhere any information on where to place the file to install it on my flash drive in order to run the program? I downloaded it and have the "badblocks-1.42" file but that's about as far as I can seem to get. All of the threads seem to indicate a pre-understainding of the usage I'm sorry I'm so useless without instruction. All of the info refers to the program for Linux and unfortunately... I just don't know how to use linux (the only linux I use is Un-Raid) and the only reason I know how to use that is because of this forum. I know that's not such a good thing but I'm not a power user and until now it's been fine for my purposes. I just don't know how to go from here. Did you try going to a command prompt and typing "badblocks" and pressing enter? I did this on 6.0 beta 6 and found it is already a part of the standard distro. Not sure what version you are using but my guess is there is no need to download or install - just read about the parameters and figure out what command you want to enter. If in doubt, post your proposed command and you can get some feedback before you run it. It is already installed... neat. This is my proposed command: badblocks /dev/sdd -svn sdd is the third drive as per the main page (the one that shows unformatted). the -s command will show me the progress of the scan the -v command gives me the verbose output (this seems to be recommended in all cases) and the -n command is to use the non destructive read-write mode because I already have a file system on the drive. Sound about right?
August 4, 201411 yr This is my proposed command: badblocks /dev/sdd -svn sdd is the third drive as per the main page (the one that shows unformatted). the -s command will show me the progress of the scan the -v command gives me the verbose output (this seems to be recommended in all cases) and the -n command is to use the non destructive read-write mode because I already have a file system on the drive. Sound about right? That looks about right! Just a warning - when you add the 'n' option in my experience it makes the process run MUCH slower so make sure you are in a position to allow for that. I will be interested in the final result. Note that this is unlikely to clear the 'unformatted' condition you were in as it will not be correcting any corruption of the file system. It might, however, allow you to get into a state where other tools run successfully against that drive.
August 9, 201411 yr Author Okay... it has run through and identified all of the badblocks (I suppose that's what it does??) It took a few days I see... what do I do next?? Should I run rebuild-tree again?
August 13, 201411 yr Author I'm not sure what that means... I've tried to figure that out. Does the badblocks process save a file when it completes?
August 13, 201411 yr I'm not sure what that means... I've tried to figure that out. Does the badblocks process save a file when it completes? There is a command line option when you run badblocks to create an output file. I think the default is simply to report it to the console. It is possible that the badblocks run you have already done succeeded in reallocating the troublesome sectors in which case simply re-running reiserfsck should make the drive mountable again. However if it did not, then you may want to rerun badblocks to create the bad sectors file so that reiserfsck can be told to ignore those blocks.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.