Right....

I have a CCTV recorder with 5 hard discs.

This recorder created 2 XFS partitions on every 1 of the 5 hard discs.

The CCTV recorder started reporting that one of the hard discs had gone
offline.

I've pulled this disc out and placed another hard disc in its place. So
the DVR is now back in business.

Howver, the pulled disc contains 17 days worth of footage from 8 cameras
that is no longer available to the DVR by virtue of being pulled out.

The Pulled disc was then connected to a PC ruuning a Live instance of
Ubuntu. There are two partitions on the pulled disc both XFS, as sdb1
and sdb2.

Using GParted to interrogate the SMART data and also used SMARTCTL in
the terminal box indicates the hard disc has no defects at all.

I then tried to mount both of the two XFS partitions.

It reported that neither partition could be mounted as:

Error mounting filesystem /dev/sdbN cant read superblock on /dev/sdbN

Where N is 1 or 2.

So I then tried to use xfs_repair on these two partitions in a terminal
window.

XFS-Repair comes back with V1 indoes unsupported, please try an older
XFSprogs.

I then downloaded Centos 5 Live CD as this has an older version of
xfs-progs. However, this will not laod on any PC as it ends with a
Kernal panic and hangs with a page of text after the Centos splash screen.

I then rebooted into ubuntu live with a another spare HDD I also
happened to have to hand.

I proceeded to use DDrescue to recover the data from the pulled disc.
This has now completed with absolutely no errors and I now have a IMG
file on the 2nd HDD.

So it appears all my files are intact, its a bad superblock both of teh
XFS partitions on the pulled hard disc

So I would like ot be able to do one of two things:

1. Somehow repair the XFS partition with a program that supports W1
inodes with a linux distro that will (a) boot without a kernel panic and
(b) has an old enough xfsprogs

2. or somehow mount & open the test.img file on the 2nd HDD so I can
then view the video files within. I tried to do this but it reports an
unsupported FS even though both Debian and Ubuntu both support XFS
partitions.

Stephen.