[mythtv-users] Lost my OS hard drive

[Brian Wood]

On Monday 14 September 2009 12:16:48 James Crow wrote:
> Brian Wood wrote:
> > 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.
>
> The drive is a WD 250GB from 2006. I have a 160GB from the same era. I
> tried to swap the boards, but it did not help. I also tried to place the
> drive in the freezer for 30 minutes and try again. That sometimes helps
> with bearings that are going bad, but did not help me.
>
> One of the biggest problems with the lose of the DB is the history of
> what we have recorded and watched. Even if I lose all current recordings
> if I had the history Myth would not try to record again what I have
> already watched.

Sounds like you have tried all the usual methods and come up empty.

I hadn't heard the freezer trick, I have heard of "gently" tapping on the 
drive case, but I never put much stock in that.

Even having myth re-record something oyu have watched might not be so bad, 
after all, it's easy enough to delete them, and you seem to have some space.

I suppose you could import your old recordings as videos, but you;d have to 
manually enter the metadata, and I don't think that would stop Myth from 
re-recording anyway.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org