The bane of having an awesome media server, regardless of whether it houses audio, video, photos or all-of-the-above is that you have to rely on physical devices somewhere to store the data…
Having recently had yet another hard drive decide to begin spewing bad sectors, I went on the hunt for recovery information for the overly complicated LVM2 system I was running. The immediate prospect of having to mirror the entire ~2TB filesystem before being able to run a repair made my head hurt. After acquiring a replacement disk for the 1 in poor health, I was tempted to try the standard Linux command ‘dd’ with some ignore errors and pad blocks options, but then I happend to stumble upon TestDisk which sounded extremely versatile and useful. However, what I was most impressed with was their extremely informative MediaWiki-based site and in particular, the Damaged Hard Disk area with references to two different versions of ‘dd rescue’ tools, in particular Antonio Diaz’s ddrescue utility. Essentially after you tell it the bad disk, and somewhere (file or other disk) to write the data, it’s fully automated. If you make sure to use the logfile feature, it can even resume and pick-up where it left off if your recovery process is interrupted for any reason.
If you’ve had hard disk/CD/DVD failures for whatever reason, I strongly suggest looking at the TestDisk page as it runs across >6 operating systems and supports >17 different filesystems derivations - oh and their site is very helpful. Have at it!
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