[CentOS] Looking for a life-save LVM Guru

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Sun, March 1, 2015 9:07 pm, Khemara Lin wrote:
> Dear Chris, James, Valeri and all,
>
> Sorry to have not responded as I'm still on struggling with the recovery
> with no success.
>
> I've been trying to set up a new system with the exact same scenario (4
> 2TB hard drives and remove the 3rd one afterwards). I still cannot
> recover.
>
> We did have a backup system but it went bad for a while and we did not
> have replacement on time until this happened.
>
>  From all of your responses, it seems, recovery is almost impossible.
> I'm now trying to look at the hardware part and get the damaged hard
> drive to fixed.
>
> I appreciate all you helps and still wait and listen to more suggestions.
>

There may be a bit expensive route. Depending on how valuable the data
are, you may think of contacting professional recovery services. They
usually take about a Month, they are expensive. Decent ones will be on the
order of $1000 if it is a single drive. Likely more if it is fatally
failed RAID. You can do your research and find good ones close to you. The
rule of thumb is: if they only charge in case of more or less successful
recovery (and sometimes they can recover almost 100%, sometimes 70-80%
sometimes nothing - then they will not charge you), then it probably is
decent company. They live from results of their work. If they charge for
"estimate" even if they tell later they can not recover, this is bad sign.
They work with fine equipment to read stuff off the platters of died
drives. They work on the level of debugging of filesystems (and RAIDs), so
what they charge is usually not that much for the kind of work they do. If
you don't feel you are that level of expert as they are, and the data is
worth it, I would contact recovery services. I myself usually have good
backup (knocking on wood), but I know several people who actually used
some of these companies, and their data got recovered. If you come to the
point of need some references, contact me off the list, I'll dig up my old
emails, and will send you what people (whom I know in person) say about
the companies they used successfully.

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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