[mythtv-users] Lost my OS hard drive

[Brian Wood]

On Monday 14 September 2009 12:04:14 James Crow wrote:
> Today I switched from DSL to cable internet. The installer asked me to
> move my computer (MBE) so that he could install a jack behind it. I shut
> everything down and moved the system. When I powered things back up I
> got the horrible click of death from one of my drives. It turns out that
> the drive that had failed is my OS disk. All my recordings sit on
> dedicated spindles. I also had a cron job that backed up my database
> every night and saved it to a directory under /home. Problem is that
> /home was on the same spindle as my /. In hindsight that was obviously
> not the correct place to store the mysql backup, but I don't think I
> realized it when I set things up.
>
> So now I have lost my mythconverg DB as well as its backups. All my
> recordings are intact. Is there any way to rebuild the portion of the
> database that shows the recorded files with just the recordings? I have
> an older db backup from ~ 6 months ago on an older machine so that will
> contain some of the older recorded and then deleted programs. I have
> 1.9TB of recordings and would hate to just end up with files I can view
> through mythvideo instead of through the recordings interface.
>
> If anyone has any ideas on possible ways to salvage a drive with the
> click of death I'm open to suggestions.

Sort of depends on what failed. Sometimes you can take the circuit board off a 
similar drive and install it on the failed one, this can work if the failure 
was electronic and not mechanical.

There are outfits that specialize in data recovery, but they are expensive, 
and a few old TV shows are probably not worth it.

You don't want to get into removing the platters, you need a clean room to do 
that properly.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org